Boehringer Ingelheim faces second hung jury in Chicago Zantac trial

The latest trial over claims that the discontinued heartburn drug Zantac causes cancer ended in a hung jury Wednesday as jurors in Chicago failed to agree on whether Boehringer Ingelheim must pay damages to an Illinois man who said he developed prostate cancer as a result of taking the drug, according to the man’s lawyer.

It was the second time a jury failed to reach a verdict at trial during the ongoing spate of litigation over the discontinued drug.

“We appreciate the jury’s careful consideration,” Eric Olson, the attorney for plaintiff Ronald Kimbrow, said in an email. “Boehringer Ingelheim has twice now failed to convince a jury that Zantac was safe.”

He said the case would go to trial again.

“We are pleased that, once again, the plaintiffs failed to convince another jury of the merit of their baseless claims about Zantac,” Boehringer Ingelheim said in a statement.

The privately held German drugmaker was the sole defendant in the lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court after plaintiff Ronald Kimbrow settled with others, including GSK, which originally developed the drug, and Pfizer.

Kimbrow, 73, said she took Zantac from 1995 to 2019.

Boehringer Ingelheim, GSK, Pfizer and Sanofi have all sold the Zantac brand name at various times since it was approved in 1983 and have been named in tens of thousands of lawsuits over the alleged cancer link.

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

Three Zantac trials had previously gone to trial, all in Illinois, two of which ended in verdicts for the defense and one in a hung jury.

Drugmakers won a significant victory in 2022 when a federal judge in Florida rejected plaintiffs’ expert witnesses in some 50,000 cases that had been brought before her court on the grounds that they did not use reliable scientific methods. Without these witnesses, the cases could not proceed, although some plaintiffs are appealing.

The Delaware Supreme Court said last month it would consider a request by drugmakers to keep similar expert testimony out of court in that state, where more than 70,000 lawsuits — the vast majority of the remaining litigation — have been filed. A lower court judge refused to exclude the experts, allowing the cases to proceed.

Sanofi agreed to settle about 4,000 cases against it, while Pfizer reportedly agreed to settle more than 10,000.

(Reporting by Pierson in New York Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Marguerita Choy)