COLUMBUS — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is pushing to lead a class-action lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company.
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He is accusing GSK, formerly known as GlaxoSmithKline, of hiding the cancer risks of its once-popular heartburn drug, Zantac.
Yost filed a motion on Monday requesting that the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) be appointed as co-lead plaintiff alongside the Indiana Public Retirement System according to an Ohio AG’s spokesperson.
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OPERS reportedly lost over $14 million due to the alleged misconduct.
The lawsuit aims to seek damages for the investors who felt the company was not being honest about the drug’s potential cancer risk that they had known about prior, the Ohio AG’s office said.
The lawsuit alleges that the company misled investors about Zantac’s safety.
“The company knew about its product’s link to cancer but kept it a secret for decades,” Yost said. “The reckless cover-up had tragic health consequences for patients and caused serious financial harm for investors.”
Zantac was prescribed over 15 million times annually after being introduced in the United States in 1983.
The Ohio AG’s office claims that GSK and its predecessor company hit an internal study in 1982 that showed Zantac can break down into compounds linked with causing cancer called NDMA. In 2019, an independent lab revealed the danger and caused several cancer-stricken patients to sue the company.
Zantac was removed from the market entirely in 2020.
Reuters reported back in October that GSK agreed to settle about 80,000 Zantac lawsuits and agreed to pay over $2 billion to settle most lawsuits in U.S. state courts.
The agreement with 10 plaintiffs’ law firms resolves about 80,000 cases, or 93% of cases pending against the British drugmaker in state courts nationwide, the company said. GSK also said it would pay $70 million to settle a related whistleblower lawsuit filed by a Connecticut laboratory.
GSK did not admit wrongdoing as part of the deal, saying in a statement that there was “no consistent or reliable evidence” that ranitidine, the drug’s active ingredient, increased the risk of cancer, Reuters reported.
However, it said the settlements were in the best long-term interest of the company to avoid the risk of continuing litigation.
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