Cancer Research Lab

An Arkansas jury on Thursday found that Wyeth provided adequate warnings about the risks associated with its hormone replacement therapy drugs and that the medicines were neither defective nor a primary cause of a woman’s breast cancer.

In a complete victory for the drugmaker, the jury of nine women and three men, after about a day and a half of deliberations, also found that Wyeth was not negligent in its promotion of the drugs, Prempro and Premarin, and that plaintiff Helene Rush, 72, should have known about the breast cancer risks associated with them.

Rush had alleged that 10 years of using Prempro and Premarin caused her breast cancer, which was diagnosed in 1999 and led to subsequent surgical removal of some breast tissue.

Wyeth over the course of the trial said it exhaustively explained the elevated health risk from the use of its drugs to doctors and patients.

Rush’s attorney had argued that there was no way that Rush or her physician knew about the cancer risks and that Wyeth put profit over patient safety.

“We believe there was a massive fraud case against Wyeth that we could not put on in the confines of this case that will be presented to a jury in other cases,” Rush’s lawyer Les Weisbrod said after the verdict was announced in U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Arkansas.

He said Wyeth had for years used false and misleading advertising to promote the drugs, resulting in many women being harmed.

Wyeth is facing some 5,000 lawsuits over the hormone replacement drugs, which were used by millions of women to control the effects of menopause and remain on the market.

Wyeth declined to comment on the outcome of the trial as a Philadelphia jury was in the process of deliberating another Prempro product liability case.

That suit is a retrial of a trial that Wyeth lost in October only to have the judge declare a mistrial and overturn the verdict against the drugmaker.

The reason for that ruling was not disclosed at the time but there has been widespread speculation the decision may have been a result of juror misconduct.

Wyeth had won an earlier Prempro trial in Arkansas, but last month a Philadelphia jury found that Prempro was responsible for a woman’s breast cancer and ordered the drugmaker to pay $1.5 million in damages.