backKing & Spalding secured a significant appellate victory for Boehringer Ingelheim in a Zantac (ranitidine) products liability case in the Second District Court of Appeal of Florida. On July 10, 2026, a three-judge panel unanimously affirmed the trial court’s entry of summary judgment in favor of Boehringer Ingelheim and its co-defendants, closing out Plaintiff Edward Wilson’s claims that his use of Defendants’ Zantac caused his prostate cancer.
Plaintiff Edward Wilson alleged that his decades-long use of over-the-counter brand-name Zantac and generic ranitidine exposed him to the carcinogen NDMA and caused his prostate cancer, asserting claims for strict products liability and negligence based on failure to warn and design defect theories against Boehringer Ingelheim and co-defendants. In August 2024, Judge Farfante of the Circuit Court for Hillsborough County excluded all four of Plaintiff’s general and specific causation experts under Daubert, finding that each expert used unreliable methodologies—including rejecting the entire body of published, peer-reviewed ranitidine epidemiology and failing to identify any threshold dose of NDMA necessary to cause prostate cancer. Having excluded Plaintiff’s experts, the trial court then granted summary judgment for the Defendants, holding that Plaintiff could not establish general or specific causation without admissible expert testimony.
On appeal, Plaintiff argued that the trial court had improperly weighed his experts’ conclusions rather than assessing the reliability of their methodologies, and that Florida’s flexible Daubert standard should have permitted his experts’ testimony to reach the jury. Defendants, led by King & Spalding, countered that the trial court had properly exercised its discretion in scrutinizing each expert’s application of their chosen methodology and that the exclusions—and resulting summary judgment—were fully supported by the record on three independent grounds. Following oral argument on May 26, 2026, the Second District Court of Appeal unanimously affirmed the trial court’s rulings in their entirety.
This is but the most recent victory in a string of opinions excluding Zantac plaintiffs’ various experts under the Daubert standard—finding no reliable scientific support for the opinion that ranitidine causes cancer.
The King & Spalding team included Ursula Henninger, Val Leppert, Greg Ruehlmann, Corinne Nabors, Eva Canaan, Bobby Woo, Patrick Price, and Arka Gupta.