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Pharmaceutical company, Pfizer Inc. has agreed to settle more than 10,000 cases accusing the company of hiding the cancer risks of its heartburn drug, Zantac.
In a report on Wednesday, Bloomberg noted that sources privy to the matter but not authorised to discuss the settlement said the financial details of the agreements were not immediately available.
The report stated that the agreements cover some state courts across the United States but don’t completely resolve the company’s exposure to Zantac claims.
Zantac, a popular antacid in the US, for more than 30 years, has been owned by different drug makers.
The drug was first developed by GlaxoSmithKline and Warner-Lambert. The drug hit the US market as a prescription drug in 1983 before becoming an over-the-counter heartburn treatment in 1996.
A pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, acquired the drug in 2017 before recalling it in 2019, about a month after an independent laboratory released tests showing the likely carcinogen NDMA in the drug and its generics.
The lab’s research indicated the drug’s active ingredient, ranitidine, formed NDMA over time or at higher temperatures.
After making confirmations, the US Food and Drug Administration, in 2020, ordered drug makers to take all versions of Zantac off the market.
However, Sanofi has since returned Zantac to the market but without its active ingredient, ranitidine, which has now been replaced with famotidine, the active ingredient in competitor heartburn drug – Pepcid.
In a statement, Pfizer stated that it “has explored and will continue to explore opportunistic settlements of certain cases if appropriate, and has settled certain cases.
“The company has not sold a Zantac product in more than 15 years and did so only for a limited period of time.”
News of the Pfizer settlement surfaced in a filing in state court in Delaware tied to the Chicago trial. More than 70,000 Zantac suits have been filed in Delaware, where a judge is mulling whether scientific evidence underlying those cases is sufficiently robust to allow them to go to trial, the report stated.
-Reassured investment-
According to Bloomberg, the deal is likely to reassure investors, who have seen other Zantac makers, including GSK Plc and Sanofi, sign settlements.
Concerns about the drug makers’ exposure to Zantac suits helped wipe out about $45 billion in combined market value in the summer of 2022. The shares have since recovered and have risen on news of the earlier deals. Pfizer shares were up 1.5% to $28.19 at 11:55 a.m. in New York.
-Past lawsuits-
Bloomberg News reported last month that Sanofi agreed to pay more than $100 million to resolve about 4,000 Zantac cases.
The settlements come as GSK defends itself in its first US jury trial over claims it knew Zantac posed a serious risk. In opening statements on May 2 in Chicago, a lawyer for the plaintiff blamed corporate greed for his client’s colorectal cancer, while an attorney for GSK told the jurors no scientific studies have linked Zantac to the disease, which affects millions of Americans every year.
Zantac plaintiffs’ lawyers filed an April 29 notice that the Chicago judge had reviewed the underlying science and cleared the case for trial. They noted that the order applied only to GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, which also made Zantac at one point, because “Pfizer had already settled.”
Before now, Bloomberg Businessweek says GSK’s own scientists have long known about the drug’s risks.
It noted over the span of multiple decades, GSK was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about a potential cancer-causing impurity in the drug.
The FDA considered the risks when it reviewed the drug, but the agency ultimately approved Zantac, or ranitidine, in 1983.
According to Bloomberg over the years, GSK supported “flawed research” aimed at downplaying risks, and it opted against making any changes to its supply chain or storage procedures that might’ve mitigated the issue, Businessweek reports. The team reviewed “thousands of pages,” including court filings and studies, to report the story.
The post Pfizer to settle over 10,000 cancer lawsuits on Zantac heartburn drug appeared first on Healthwise.