(Reuters) – GSK said on Thursday it agreed to confidentially settle one more lawsuit in California that alleged its discontinued heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer, the latest in a series of settlements to end costly litigation.
The case was set to go to trial on Feb. 20 and instead, will now be dismissed, the British drugmaker said in a statement.
GSK continued to maintain that it does not admit to any liability.
In 2019, some manufacturers and pharmacies halted Zantac sales over concerns that its active ingredient, ranitidine, degraded over time to form a chemical called NDMA. While NDMA can be present in low levels in food and water, research has found it causes cancer in larger amounts.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2020 pulled Zantac and its generic versions off the market, triggering a wave of lawsuits.
As of October, GSK still faced about 79,000 cases related to Zantac in the United States, with 73,000 of them in Delaware.
California is generally seen as a more challenging legal environment for multinational companies as courts are known to be friendlier to plaintiffs.
Analysts have estimated total settlement costs for GSK of around $5 billion, set to be realised in the first quarter of 2024. (This story has been refiled to change the image)
(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Savio D’Souza and Rashmi Aich)
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