DOVER – A Delaware judge has allowed more than 70,000 lawsuits over Zantac, a discontinued heartburn drug, to move forward, ruling that expert witnesses can testify in court that the drug can cause cancer.
Friday’s ruling by Judge Vivian Medinilla of Delaware Superior Court in Wilmington is a setback for former Zantac makers GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim, which had argued that the experts’ opinions lacked scientific support.
“This brings us one step closer to justice for our clients,” Brent Wisner, one of the plaintiffs’ lead attorneys, said in a statement Saturday.
GSK, Pfizer and Sanofi said in separate statements that they disagreed with the decision and would appeal. They said there was no reliable evidence showing that Zantac caused cancer. A spokesperson for Boehringer Ingelheim did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2019, some manufacturers and pharmacies suspended sales of Zantac after a chemical called NDMA, which is known to cause cancer, was detected in some pills. Some tests showed that Zantac’s active ingredient, ranitidine, could degrade to NDMA over time or when exposed to heat.
Lawsuits began piling up from people who said they developed cancer after taking Zantac. The plaintiffs said the companies knew, or should have known, that ranitidine posed a cancer risk and failed to warn consumers.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked manufacturers to remove the drug from the market in 2020. Drugmakers have maintained that there is no evidence that Zantac exposed users to harmful levels of NDMA.
Medinilla presides over most of the nearly 80,000 cases still pending in the United States over Zantac, once the best-selling drug in the world.
In addition to the Delaware cases, drugmakers face about 4,000 lawsuits in California state courts and about 2,000 in other state courts across the country.
Last month, a Chicago jury rejected an Illinois woman’s claim that Zantac caused her colon cancer, handing GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim a victory in the first case to go to trial.
Drugmakers scored a significant victory in 2022, when another judge dismissed about 50,000 lawsuits over similar claims that had been consolidated in federal court in Florida.
That judge concluded that the plaintiffs’ experts’ opinions that Zantac can cause cancer were not supported by sound science. The plaintiffs are appealing that ruling.
Zantac became the world’s best-selling drug in 1988 and one of the first drugs to surpass $1 billion in annual sales. Originally marketed by a precursor to GSK, it was subsequently sold successively to Pfizer, Boehringer and finally Sanofi.
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