First PremPro Trial Begins

PHILADELPHIA — Wyeth's (WYE) PremPro hormone-replacement drug "fertilized" what eventually became breast cancer in a 66-year-old Ohio woman who has sued the company, her lawyer said Wednesday at the start of a trial.

A Wyeth lawyer disputed the claim, saying the woman had numerous other risk factors for breast cancer, such as a family history of cancer, that made it 10 times more likely she would develop the disease compared with other women in their 60s.

Jennie Nelson, of Dayton, Ohio, took PremPro to treat menopausal symptoms from October 1996 until October 2001, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before that she had taken a similar regimen including the Wyeth drug Premarin since February 1995.

Mrs. Nelson's lawyer, Ken Suggs, told an eight-member jury in a state courtroom in Philadelphia that more than two dozen studies have shown PremPro increases the risk for breast cancer. Mr. Suggs asserted that Mrs. Nelson's use of PremPro transformed a mass in her breast known as hyperplasia into cancer.

"You'll hear how the defendant's pill took a hyperplasia and fertilized it," Mr. Suggs said in a somewhat subdued opening statement Wednesday morning. He added that the case was about "costs and consequences."

Mr. Nelson's lawsuit against Wyeth, the Madison, New Jersey, pharmaceutical company, is the second PremPro case to go to trial. Jury deliberations are underway in the first case to go to trial in federal court in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Wyeth faces about 5,000 lawsuits filed by women claiming their use of PremPro and Premarin led to breast cancer and other diseases. Most were spurred by government studies linking the drugs to increased risk for various diseases.The drugs are still on the market, but publicity surrounding the government studies has caused Wyeth sales of Premarin-related products to drop to $909 million last year from $2.1 billion in 2001, the last full year before the key government studies began emerging. Wyeth maintains that it's impossible to prove that PremPro caused individual cases of breast cancer.