LONDON: UK pharmaceutical giant GSK says it will pay $2.2bn to settle thousands of cases in US courts alleging that a discontinued version of its heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer.
The firm said that it had reached agreements with 10 law firms that represent around 80,000 petitioners. These settlements account for 93 percent of all cases against the GSK.
As per reports GSK will also pay $70m to resolve a complaint by a laboratory that said the drug-making firm defrauded the US government by hiding Zantac’s cancer risks. Despite these settlements, GSK did not admit wrongdoing in any of the cases.
The company in a statement to investors said that the settlements remove significant financial uncertainty, risk and distraction associated with protracted litigation. The Zantac medicine was first approved for sale in the US in 1983. It was the world’s best-selling drug, with annual sales topping $1bn within five years.
In 2020, US regulators banned the sales of Zantac due to fears that a key ingredient, ranitidine, could turn into a substance that may cause cancer. The development led to tens of thousands of lawsuits against the drug’s manufacturers.
Last year, UK doctors were told to stop prescribing Zantac as a “precautionary measure”. The drug has also been marketed by other prominent pharmaceutical firms Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim.