GSK can breathe a lit­tle eas­i­er af­ter a Flori­da fed­er­al judge dis­missed thou­sands of claims that Zan­tac and re­lat­ed heart­burn prod­ucts caused can­cer, trig­ger­ing a boost in pre­mar­ket trad­ing on Wednes­day.

Plain­tiffs in the sprawl­ing mul­ti­dis­trict lit­i­ga­tion (MDL) at first at­tempt­ed to link pop­u­lar ran­i­ti­dine heart­burn prod­ucts to 10 types of can­cer, but lat­er with­drew breast, kid­ney, col­orec­tal, prostate and lung. On Tues­day, Judge Robin Rosen­berg tossed the re­main­ing claims in liv­er, blad­der, pan­cre­at­ic, esophageal, and stom­ach can­cers, up­on de­ter­min­ing that the al­le­ga­tions were based on “flawed” and “un­re­li­able” ev­i­dence.

Pfiz­er, Boehringer In­gel­heim and Sanofi, which owned Zan­tac rights at var­i­ous points in time, were al­so named in the suit, in ad­di­tion to Ther­mo Fish­er’s Patheon Man­u­fac­tur­ing Ser­vices.

GSK’s stock $GSK was down 2% on Wednes­day at $37.16, af­ter re­port­ed­ly jump­ing about 14% in ear­ly trad­ing.

“Here, there is no sci­en­tist out­side this lit­i­ga­tion who con­clud­ed ran­i­ti­dine caus­es can­cer, and the Plain­tiffs’ sci­en­tists with­in this lit­i­ga­tion sys­tem­i­cal­ly uti­lized un­re­li­able method­olo­gies with a lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion on how ex­per­i­ments were con­duct­ed, a lack of sub­stan­ti­a­tion for an­a­lyt­i­cal leaps, a lack of sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant da­ta, and a lack of in­ter­nal­ly con­sis­tent, ob­jec­tive, sci­ence-based stan­dards for the even­hand­ed eval­u­a­tion of da­ta,” Rosen­berg wrote in an opin­ion.

Zan­tac was first ap­proved as a pre­scrip­tion med­i­cine for heart­burn in 1983, and af­ter a decade of record sales, GSK be­gan work­ing on an over-the-counter for­mu­la­tion. Sev­er­al OTC forms were cleared in 1995, and those sales rights lat­er passed through the hands of Pfiz­er, Boehringer In­gel­heim and Sanofi. How­ev­er, the drug was re­called in 2019 over un­ac­cept­ably high lev­els of a po­ten­tial car­cino­gen known as ND­MA.

Plain­tiffs ar­gued that ran­i­ti­dine can trans­form in­to ND­MA in the body or on the shelf in high tem­per­a­tures, and in 2020, reg­u­la­tors re­quest­ed the re­call of all ran­i­ti­dine prod­ucts. More than 2,450 plain­tiffs filed suits in the MDL, or had cas­es trans­ferred to the Flori­da fed­er­al court.

“We didn’t ob­serve un­ac­cept­able lev­els of ND­MA in many of the sam­ples that we test­ed,” for­mer act­ing com­mis­sion­er Janet Wood­cock said around the time of the re­call. “How­ev­er, since we don’t know how or for how long the prod­uct might have been stored, we de­cid­ed that it should not be avail­able to con­sumers and pa­tients un­less its qual­i­ty can be as­sured.”

GSK con­tin­ues to ar­gue that “the sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus is that there is no con­sis­tent or re­li­able ev­i­dence that ran­i­ti­dine in­creas­es the risk of any can­cer.”

“Yes­ter­day’s rul­ing re­flects the state of that sci­ence and en­sured that un­re­li­able and lit­i­ga­tion-dri­ven sci­ence did not en­ter the fed­er­al court­room,” the com­pa­ny said in a news re­lease.

The re­cent dis­missal does not af­fect thou­sands of on­go­ing cas­es at the state lev­el, many of which in­clude plain­tiffs who ex­it­ed fed­er­al MDL or whose al­leged in­juries had been dropped, a Sanofi spokesper­son told End­points News back in Sep­tem­ber.

GSK said in its an­nounce­ment on Wednes­day that it will “con­tin­ue to de­fend it­self vig­or­ous­ly, in­clud­ing against all claims brought at the state lev­el.”

The com­pa­ny not­ed on its Q3 call last month that 70,000 new claims had been filed in the state of Delaware, the ma­jor­i­ty of which had “not been vet­ted at this point in time.”

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

We now know where Roche’s ex-pharma chief Bill Anderson is going.

German pharma giant Bayer announced Wednesday that Anderson will be taking on the role as CEO, less than six weeks after Anderson stepped down from his perch at Roche as head of the group’s pharmaceutical division.

Roche announced back in December that Anderson would depart on Dec. 31 to “pursue opportunities outside of Roche.” His replacement, Genentech vet and Roche’s current head of global product strategy, Teresa Graham, will start her role in March.

As talk of AI this-and-that gobbles up headline after headline, one Big Pharma is losing its AI leader as she transitions to another drug giant: Iya Khalil will trade in her hat as Novartis’ go-to expert and leader in the space for Merck as VP and head of data, AI and genome sciences next week.

After nearly three years leading the artificial intelligence team at Novartis — as Big Pharma and biotechs alike latch onto the ripening AI-for-drug-discovery mode of operation — Khalil will switch employers to head up a similar post at Merck, where she’ll work out of Cambridge, MA beginning Feb. 13, the company tells Endpoints News.