(Reuters) – Thousands of U.S. federal lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim linking stomach acid drug Zantac to cancer were dismissed in court on Tuesday from Florida.
West Palm Beach District Judge Robin Rosenberg said the complaints were not supported by strong scientific arguments.
The laboratories, which have all marketed this drug at different times, remain the target of tens of thousands of similar complaints in state courts.
“We are extremely surprised by this miscarriage of justice and await the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to reverse these decisions on appeal,” plaintiffs’ attorneys said in a statement.
A Sanofi spokesperson said the ruling “significantly narrows the scope of the litigation, by more than 50%.” GSK also welcomed the decision, according to a spokesperson.
Zantac, approved in 1983, became the world’s top-selling drug in 1988 and one of the first to exceed $1 billion in annual sales. First marketed by a predecessor of GSK, it was then sold successively to Pfizer, Boehringer and finally Sanofi.
Many generic manufacturers have also launched their own version of the treatment, but are not affected by the collective lawsuit in US federal justice.
In 2019, several manufacturers stopped selling Zantac over concerns that its active ingredient, ranitidine, would break down over time to form NDMA, a chemical found in low doses in water and food but known to cause become carcinogenic at higher doses.
Zantac and its generic versions were pulled from the US market in 2020 by the Food and Drug Administration, the drug’s regulatory authority, after studies showed that the amount of NDMA increased with the length of time the drug was stored.
The pharmaceutical groups declare that no real-life study confirms the hypothesis of a link between the treatment and cancer.
(Written by Brendan Pierson in New York, French version Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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