GSK’s first Zan­tac tri­al has been post­poned un­til Ju­ly, the com­pa­ny con­firmed on Fri­day.

The Cal­i­for­nia state court tri­al, brought by James Goetz who al­leged the pop­u­lar heart­burn med­ica­tion caused his blad­der can­cer, was ini­tial­ly slat­ed to be­gin on Mon­day. How­ev­er, ju­ry se­lec­tion has been pushed back un­til Ju­ly 24, as judge Eve­lio Gril­lo con­tin­ues to de­lib­er­ate over ex­pert tes­ti­mo­ny, a GSK spokesper­son told End­points News.

The news comes just a cou­ple months af­ter a Flori­da judge dis­missed thou­sands of fed­er­al claims that Zan­tac and its re­lat­ed heart­burn prod­ucts caused a range of can­cers up­on find­ing that the al­le­ga­tions were based on “flawed” and “un­re­li­able” ev­i­dence. The sprawl­ing mul­ti­dis­trict lit­i­ga­tion had al­so named Pfiz­er, Boehringer In­gel­heim and Sanofi, which owned Zan­tac rights at var­i­ous points in time, as well as Ther­mo Fish­er’s Patheon Man­u­fac­tur­ing Ser­vices.

That leaves state cas­es, in­clud­ing Goetz who set­tled with Sanofi and Pfiz­er in De­cem­ber, ac­cord­ing to a Bloomberg re­port. 

Zan­tac was first ap­proved as a pre­scrip­tion med­i­cine for heart­burn in 1983, lead­ing to record sales and even­tu­al­ly sev­er­al over-the-counter forms. How­ev­er, the drug was re­called in 2019 over un­ac­cept­ably high lev­els of a po­ten­tial can­cer-caus­ing sub­stance known as ND­MA.

Plain­tiffs ar­gued that ran­i­ti­dine can trans­form in­to ND­MA in the body or on the shelf in high tem­per­a­tures, and though for­mer act­ing com­mis­sion­er Janet Wood­cock said that the FDA “didn’t ob­serve un­ac­cept­able lev­els of ND­MA in many of the sam­ples that we test­ed,” reg­u­la­tors re­quest­ed a re­call of all ran­i­ti­dine prod­ucts the fol­low­ing year.

Wood­cock said at the time that “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 pre­vi­ous­ly ar­gued that “there is no con­sis­tent or re­li­able ev­i­dence that ran­i­ti­dine in­creas­es the risk of any can­cer.”

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Boehringer Ingelheim reported human pharma sales of €18.5 billion on Wednesday, led by type 2 diabetes and heart failure drug Jardiance and pulmonary fibrosis med Ofev. Jardiance sales reached €5.8 billion, growing 39% year over year, while Ofev took in €3.2 billion, notching its own 20.6% annual jump.

However, Boehringer is also looking ahead with its pipeline, estimating “In the next seven years the company expects about 20 regulatory approvals in human pharma.”

Microcap biotech Seelos Therapeutics is halting enrollment of its study in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (also known as Machado-Joseph disease) because of “financial considerations,” and in order to focus on other studies, the company said today, adding that the pause would be temporary.

The study will continue with the patients who have already enrolled, and the data from them will be used to decide whether to continue enrolling others in the future.

The FDA today approved Emergent BioSolutions’ Narcan brand naloxone nasal spray for over-the-counter sales. The nod was expected and comes on the heels of a unanimous 19-0 advisory committee vote in favor of approval last month.

The move to OTC means the opioid overdose reversal agent will now be available on grocery, convenience and gas stations shelves, as well as potentially for purchase online.