Third trial over Zantac cancer claims ends with hung jury

The third trial over claims that Zantac disrupted the heartburn drug ended in a mistrial Wednesday when jurors couldn’t agree on whether the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim was responsible for a man’s cancer Illinois.

Martin Gross claimed in his lawsuit in state court in Chicago that he developed prostate cancer from a carcinogenic contaminant called NDMA found in the drug. His lawyer, Sean Grimsley, said he would take his case to court again.

“We continue to believe in our case, our cause and our client,” he said.

Boehringer Ingelheim said in a statement that it was “disappointed” that the jury did not reach a verdict and that “the totality of the scientific evidence” supports “one conclusion: Zantac does not cause any type of cancer.”

First approved by US regulators in 1983, Zantac became the world’s best-selling drug in 1988 and one of the first to surpass $1 billion in annual sales. It was sold at different times to Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer and Sanofi, all of which have faced thousands of lawsuits.

Two such cases have previously gone to trial, both ending in verdicts for the defense – one for Boehringer Ingelheim and GSK in May and the other for GSK on Monday.

Sanofi agreed to settle about 4,000 cases against it, while Pfizer reportedly agreed to settle more than 10,000. The companies have also settled some individual cases before trial.

Most of the lawsuits are in Delaware state court, where a judge in June allowed more than 70,000 cases to proceed after rejecting the defendants’ bid to keep key plaintiffs’ expert witnesses out of court on the grounds that their scientific methods they were not reliable. . The companies are appealing this decision.

The litigation began after the US Food and Drug Administration in 2020 asked manufacturers to pull the drug off the market over concerns that ranitidine, the active ingredient in Zantac and generic versions of the drug, could degrade into NDMA over time or when exposed to heat.

The drugmakers said the cases lacked merit. They won a significant victory in 2022 when a federal judge in Florida ruled against about 50,000 cases, finding that the alleged link to cancer was not supported by sound science. Some of these cases are appealed.

(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Diane Craft)

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