http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8MPTOEG0.htm

3rd Prempro lawsuit goes to trial

By JILL ZEMAN
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.

Another Arkansas woman is taking Wyeth pharmaceutical company to court on allegations that the drugmaker's hormone-replacement therapy Prempro caused her breast cancer.

Jury selection was scheduled to begin Monday in the case filed by Helene Rush, of Little Rock, marking the third time that a case involving the Prempro allegations have gone to trial.

Wyeth is facing roughly 5,000 cases over the hormone-replacement therapy.

Rush sued the company in 2005 after taking Prempro for nine years and developing breast cancer in 1999. The case comes after an unsuccessful lawsuit by another Arkansas woman, Linda Reeves, of Benton.

In Pennsylvania, a married couple won a $1.5 million jury award in a similar case, but a judge in October declared a mistrial. The grounds for the mistrial were sealed.

Wyeth makes Prempro, which is a combination of estrogen and progestin, and Premarin, which is estrogen only. Rush took Prempro to ease menopausal symptoms, according to her lawsuit.

Many women stopped taking the drugs after a federal Women's Health Initiative study in July 2002 in which researchers said more breast cancer and heart problems occurred among women taking estrogen-progestin pills.

"The hormone drugs were defective because they were not accompanied by proper, appropriate and adequate warnings of the significance and degree of the known and reasonably knowable risks," Rush's lawsuit said.

U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson has issued a gag order in Rush's case.

In the Reeves case, attorneys for Madison, N.J.-based Wyeth argued that the benefits of Prempro and Premarin outweighed the risks and that the drug company had informed both Reeves and her doctor of the risks associated with the drugs.

In a pretrial filing in the Rush case, Wyeth attorneys noted that the issue of breast cancer and a potential link to hormone-replacement therapy had been publicized recently, and they asked for a "more specific and probing" selection of jurors.

Wyeth attorney F. Lane Heard III noted in the filing that a November episode of ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" featured a plot line that involved a man who was taking estrogen while undergoing a sex change.

In the episode, the character learned he had developed breast cancer and was told that continuing estrogen therapy in order to remain a woman came at the cost of dying of breast cancer.

Ratings from Nielsen Media Research estimated that nearly 20 million people watched the program, the filing said.

Rush's trial is expected to last two or three weeks.