British pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed across the United States related to its heartburn medication Zantac, which is linked to cancer. A settlement made with 10 law firms representing about 80,000 claimants totals up to $2.2 billion (£1.68 billion) and resolves 93 percent of the pending cases.
As part of the settlement in the lawsuits, GSK agreed to pay $70 million in settlement of a whistleblower claim filed by a lab that accused the company of a scheme to defraud the US Government on “matters related to the failure to disclose known cancer risks associated with the heartburn medication Zantac.” GSK neither admitted nor denied liability in connection with either lawsuit.
Settlements enable the companies “to put behind them significant financial uncertainty, risk, and distraction associated with protracted litigation,” GSK said. Zantac was first approved in the U.S. in 1983 and became the world’s biggest-selling drug, earning more than $1 billion a year. But regulators pulled Zantac from the shelves in 2020 after fears that heating ranitidine can degrade into a cancer-causing chemical.
These cases have already sparked a wave of such lawsuits against GSK and other manufacturers as well, including Pfizer, Sanofi, and Boehringer Ingelheim. Although Pfizer and Sanofi also reached settlements in connection with Zantac, Boehringer Ingelheim has yet to come out into the public with any significant ones.
In the market today, a new version of the drug is called Zantac 360 without ranitidine but only is sold. The present incidents unfolding have signaled and continued to further raise the pressure of scrutiny and legal attacks toward the pharmaceutical companies in terms of drug safety and transparency.