PARIS (Reuters) – Sanofi announced on Tuesday that it had won the arbitration initiated by Boehringer Ingelheim in the case of Zantac, a treatment for gastric acidity accused of being carcinogenic.

“The arbitral tribunal rejected Boehringer Ingelheim’s claim against Sanofi for compensation for any damages that may arise from the ongoing litigation in the United States relating to Zantac,” the group said in a statement, adding that the decision is final. and is not subject to appeal.

Boehringer Ingelheim said he took note of the arbitration tribunal’s decision and would not comment further.

On the Paris Stock Exchange, the Sanofi share gained 2.4% in the first exchanges, at the top of the CAC 40 which lost 0.2% at the same time.

The arbitration arises from contractual indemnification obligations agreed between Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim in connection with the exchange, in January 2017, of Sanofi’s animal health business for Boehringer Ingelheim’s consumer health business.

It was then that Sanofi obtained the drug Zantac in its portfolio, approved in 1983 and which in 1988 became the best-selling drug in the world and one of the first to exceed $1 billion in annual sales.

First marketed by a predecessor of GSK, it was then sold successively to Pfizer, Boehringer and finally Sanofi.

In 2019, several manufacturers stopped selling Zantac over concerns that its active ingredient, ranitidine, would break down over time to form NDMA, a chemical found in low doses in water and food but known to cause become carcinogenic at higher doses.

Zantac and its generic versions were pulled from the US market in 2020 by the Food and Drug Administration, the drug’s regulatory authority, after studies showed that the amount of NDMA increased with the length of time the drug was stored.

In December, several thousand complaints filed in the US federal courts against the pharmaceutical groups GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim establishing a link between Zantac and cancer were dismissed in a Florida court.

In its statement, Sanofi said on Tuesday that “tens of thousands of plaintiffs” have since chosen to either drop their complaints or withdraw the lawsuit in favor of a state court proceeding or a waiver. pure and simple of any complaint.

“These recent developments have considerably reduced the potential scale of the dispute,” the group said.

(Written by Blandine Hénault, with contributions from Ludgwig Burger, edited by Kate Entringer)

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