Baxter Healthcare Corp. v. Denton

In Baxter Healthcare Corp. v. Denton (2004) 120 Cal.App.4th 333, Baxter Healthcare demonstrated that the mechanism that caused liver cancer in laboratory mice did not operate in humans exposed to DEHP. (Id. at p. 350.) For this reason, the Court of Appeal concluded that there was substantial evidence supporting the superior court's conclusion that DEHP did not pose a significant risk of cancer in humans. (Id. at p. 371.) Baxter Healthcare thus only stands for the proposition that in some cases--namely, those cases where experimental animals and humans differ from one another in physiologically significant ways--extrapolation to humans from animal studies is not appropriate.