A Cook County jury found that two drug makers were not responsible for a Brookfield woman’s colon cancer.
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Cook County jurors declined to find two pharmaceutical companies responsible for an elderly Brookfield woman’s colon cancer. She sued them alleging the popular heartburn drug Zantac was a culprit for her disease.
Jurors deliberated for just over four hours from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning. The three-week long trial — a first of thousands of similar cases nationwide to appear before a jury — wrapped up Wednesday. Lawyers laid out two starkly different arguments in their final pitches to the jury of nine women and three men.
They did agree she proved she took Zantac for nearly 20 years, but they did not find it was the cause of her colon cancer.
Over the course of the trial, lawyers for 89-year-old Angela Valadez shared how her life was turned upside down after she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2015. They also alleged that the active ingredient in Zantac, called ranitidine, degrades into the cancer-causing substance NDMA, or nitrosodimethylamine.
On the defense side, attorneys representing the drug makers GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim repeatedly emphasized the safety and effectiveness of Zantac. They said the real cause of Valadez’s cancer was a host of other health factors and the fact that she neglected to get a colonoscopy for decades.
Jurors were tasked with deciding whether GSK and Boehringer Ingelheim failed to warn consumers about the dangers of consuming Zantac, whether they were negligent in how they handled the drug and warned consumers about NDMA and if the companies negligently misrepresented the product.
They also had to determine if the drug was a cause, but not the only cause, of Valadez’s cancer and if she was also liable for neglecting to follow doctor’s orders to get a colonoscopy sooner.
Attorneys for both sides were silent as the verdict was read. They all shook hands once the jury was dismissed. Valadez was not in the courtroom.
Mikal Watts, one of the attorneys representing Valadez, said he respected the jury’s decision and appreciated their service.
“We have more Zantac trials coming up, this is a marathon, not a sprint,” Watts told reporters. “There’s going to be a lot of juries that look at the facts and we are confident that future juries will agree that GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim and other purveyors of the drug have caused a lot of damage to different members of the American public. But it’s a case-by-case evaluation, so this is just one step in a long process.”
More trials are scheduled in Cook County for similar claims from people who used Zantac and developed cancer. Trials are coming up in June, July, September and November, Watts said.
Throughout their respective cases, lawyers presented conflicting science and studies on ranitidine and NDMA, brought to the stand paid experts with backgrounds in epidemiology and drug quality control and walked the jurors through the minutiae of drug manufacturing regulations in the U.S. and Europe.
Zantac first came on the market in 1983. It soon became the world’s best selling drug in 1988 and was one of the first to ever top $1 billion in annual sales. It was developed by a forerunner of GSK and later sold to PIfzer in 1998. Boehringer Ingelheim bought the drug in 2006 and sold it in 2017.
In 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked drug makers to pull Zantac and its generic versions off the market after NDMA was found in samples of the drug. Thousands of lawsuits began piling up in federal and state courts.
The FDA later found there was no danger posed to Zantac users, but the drug has remained off the market since. A different version of the heartburn medicine, called Zantac 360, is currently sold, but it does not contain ranitidine.