Drugmakers GSK and Boehringer win 1st Zantac ‘cancer claims’ lawsuit

An Illinois jury sided with pharmaceutical manufacturers GlaxoSmithKline and Boehringer Ingelheim in the first Zantac verdict in the nation.

Thursday’s defense win, in the Cook County Circuit Court, comes as thousands of other cases have alleged that the over-the-counter heartburn medication the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recalled in 2020 caused various forms of cancer.

And the verdict, in a case brought by plaintiff Angela Valadez, comes two years after a federal judge tossed all the plaintiffs’ experts in the multidistrict litigation.

“While Boehringer Ingelheim sympathizes with Mrs. Valadez, the outcome of this case is entirely consistent with the totality of the scientific evidence—including numerous recently conducted epidemiological studies—which shows that Zantac does not cause any type of cancer,” Boehringer Ingelheim said in a statement.

It added: “At Boehringer Ingelheim, the patients we serve, and their safety, remain our top priority today and into the future.  We are pleased with the jury’s verdict and will vigorously defend all remaining cases.”

GlaxoSmithKline attorney Tarik Ismail, of Chicago’s Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum, did not respond to a request for comment.

“We appreciate this jury’s service and respect their verdict—in this case,” Mikal Watts, of Watts Law Firm in Austin, Texas, who represented Valadez with Chicago’s Keller Postman, said in an email to Law.com. “The usage and causation facts in this case were challenging, but there are Zantac jury trials scheduled in Chicago in June, July, September, and November of 2024, and in Philadelphia beginning in February of 2025. We look forward to demonstrating that Zantac harmed a lot of Americans, which is why it has been recalled worldwide.”

In her 2022 ruling, U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg, who sits in the Southern District of Florida, effectively dismissed the entire Zantac multidistrict litigation, which involved about 50,000 claims, after finding plaintiffs’ 10 experts made “analytical leaps” from existing data to reach unreliable opinions that differed from established science.

Related: Pfizer agrees to settle 10K Zantac lawsuits, as GSK drug links heartburn drug to cancer

Most of the Zantac cases are now in state courts in California, Delaware, Illinois and Pennsylvania. Many of those cases involve cancers not at issue in the Zantac multidistrict litigation, which streamlined the claims to focus on bladder, gastric, esophageal, liver and pancreatic, creating a split among the plaintiffs bar on how to litigate the cases.

One of the diseases excluded from the multidistrict litigation, colorectal cancer, is what Valadez was diagnosed with after using Zantac, or the generic counterpart of ranitidine, from 1995 to 2014, according to the complaint.