Zan­tac pulled off shelves due to can­cer scare; The end of the road for Mo­tif Bio

→ GSK is re­call­ing its heart­burn med­i­cine Zan­tac, sold gener­i­cal­ly as ran­i­ti­dine, from all mar­kets af­ter the FDA found it con­tains “‘un­ac­cept­able’ lev­els of prob­a­ble can­cer-caus­ing im­pu­ri­ty.” The drug is one of sev­er­al blood pres­sure and heart fail­ure med­ica­tions that have been pulled off the sheves since last year due to con­cerns about car­cino­genic ma­te­r­i­al in­tro­duced in the man­u­fac­tur­ing process. Four Zan­tac pre­scrip­tion-on­ly med­i­cines are in­volved: a syrup, an in­jec­tion and tablets of 150 and 300 mil­ligram (mg) dosages. But the over-the-counter ver­sions, which are pro­duced by a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, would not be af­fect­ed, ac­cord­ing to the UK’s Med­i­cines and Health­care prod­ucts Reg­u­la­tion Agency.

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