WILMINGTON, Del. (Legal Newsline) - A Delaware judge has decided how 77,000 lawsuits filed in the state over the heartburn medicine Zantac will proceed, while a California court prepares for the first trial in the country.
Judge Vivian Medinilla, of the Delaware Superior Court, issued a case management order on March 23 that sets a process for selecting bellwether plaintiffs, picks lead counsel for them and creates a trial solely to determine whether Zantac causes various types of cancer.
Meanwhile, plaintiff James Goetz is due in court July 24 for the first Zantac trial in Oakland, Calif. The defendant is Zantac-maker GlaxoSmithKline.
The law firm Wisner Baum and Moore Law Group are representing Goetz. They are also co-lead counsel in the Delaware mass proceeding, as are Jacobs & Crumplar and Parafinczuk Wolf.
Plaintiff lawyers jumped on an announcement in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration that Zantac contained a high level of a carcinogen known as NDMA. Research by X Ante and Kantar Media CMAG showed spending on ads seeking clients accelerated in late 2019.
According to X Ante, there were only 587 Zantac ads in September and October 2019. The following two-month span saw more than 7,000.
In that same period, plaintiffs lawyers began filing class action lawsuits against Sanofi, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Walmart, Walgreens, Kroger, Pfizer and Chattem.
These fraud lawsuits say the defendants failed their duty to customers to ensure their Zantac/ranitidine products did not contain any dangerous condition. They note that NDMA has been classified as probably carcinogenic to humans by the EPA.
In the 77,000 Delaware cases, the following cancers are alleged: Bladder, breast, colorectal, esophageal, stomach, liver, lung, pancreatic and prostate. The defendants are GSK, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Sanofi.
“The formation of a new venue for these cases creates more opportunity for our clients and other people throughout the country stricken with cancer after taking a drug that we believe is dangerous,” attorney R. Brent Wisner said. “We look forward to presenting evidence at trial that Zantac causes cancer, and that the defendants have known about the risks for decades.”
The sides are currently selecting bellwether discovery plaintiffs, with expert reports on the issue of causation due July 17.
By Nov. 1, the sides will move to exclude the opinions of those experts under the Daubert standard for expert testimony. Those motions and the oppositions to them will be heard in January 2024.