Download hormone therapy litigation - HB Litigation Conferences

HORMONE THERAPY
LITIGATION
Battling for Breast Cancer
Survivors
Zoe Littlepage
Littlepage Booth
2043 A West Main Street
Houston, Texas 77098
(713) 529-8000
[email protected]
Hormone Therapy Litigation
The Hormone Therapy Litigation includes more than 11,000 plaintiffs who took
combination hormone drugs (E+P or estrogen and progestin) and developed breast
cancer. The MDL is pending in Little Rock, Arkansas before Judge William Wilson.
There are also pockets of state court litigation: more than a thousand cases in
Philadelphia, PA; less than 200 in New Jersey; less than 100 in New York and then a
scattering of single cases across the country.
While there are also cases pending for other injuries including ovarian cancer,
stroke, blood clots and heart problems, there are currently no trial settings involving
these injuries. The focus of the Bellwether trials to date have been for women who
developed breast cancer cases following ingestion of E+P whether in two pills (Premarin
and Provera) or in one combination tablet, Prempro.
The chief defendants in the litigation are Wyeth (makers of Premarin and
Prempro) and the Pfizer/ Pharmacia/Upjohn defendants (maker of Provera). Indeed,
these two drug companies owned more than 85% of the hormone therapy market.
However, hundreds of women also took estrogen or progestin made by other named
defendants including Bristol Myers, Solvay, Barr, Novartis etc.
To date, there have been numerous trials and en women have settled their
claims with the following results:
HRT Trials
Name
Location
Outcome
Reeves v. Wyeth
Nelson v. Wyeth
McCreary v. Wyeth
Daniel v. Wyeth
Little Rock, AR
Philadelphia, PA
Reno, Nevada
Philadelphia, PA
Nelson v. Wyeth (retrial)
Rush v. Wyeth
Simon v. Wyeth & Pfizer
Deutsch v. Wyeth
Rowatt et al v. Wyeth
Philadelphia, PA
Defense verdict
$1.5 million verdict
Settled
$1.5 million verdict
Punitive damage award sealed
$3 million verdict
Scroggin v. Wyeth &
Pfizer
Little Rock, AR
Philadelphia, PA
New Brunswick, NJ
Reno, Nevada
Little Rock, AR
Defense verdict
$1.5 million verdict
Settled
$134 million verdict
Pfizer settled pre-trial
$2.75 million + $19.3 million in
punitives
Background of Hormone Therapy Drugs
Premarin (estrogen) was first marketed to alleviate menopausal symptoms in
1942. However, its use did not become popular until 1966 when a bestselling book,
Feminine Forever, hit the market and strongly recommend estrogen as a fountain of
youth drug. Sales took off – until 1975 – when bad news hit. In 1975, two published
medical articles established that estrogen was causing an endometrial cancer epidemic
in this country. For the first time, doctors and women knew that estrogen alone caused
cancer below the waist. Premarin sales plummeted. The manufacturers’ solution was
to recommend the use of two drugs together: estrogen to help with hot flashes and
synthetic progestin or MPA (Provera) to protect the endometrium from the cancercausing potential of estrogen. Unfortunately, even though the drug companies started
promoting this combination of drugs for long-term use, not a single company did any
long-term studies to look at the carcinogenic potential of this combination in a woman’s
body. Despite internal memorandum confirming that the companies knew that breast
cancer was an open and unresolved issue with the combination drugs, no studies were
conducted. One has to wonder if the endometrial cancer crisis had taught drug
companies one thing: don’t test for cancer because cancer warnings kill sales.
The combination E+P sold well. Indeed, so well, that in 1994 Wyeth got a new
drug approved (Prempro) which was a single tablet containing both E+P. Prempro
allowed women to get just one prescription, pay one co-pay and take only one pill each
morning. Prempro quickly dominated the E+P market. At its height, Wyeth sold more
than $2 Billion per year of its hormone therapy drugs.
For years, Wyeth spent more than $200 million each year in marketing the drugs
while, at the same time, ignoring numerous red flags that the drugs were not safe.
Wyeth chose to protect its bottom dollar instead of protecting the patients. It was not
until July of 2002, when the government’s Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study
stopped early because of the breast cancer problems, that doctors and the public finally
learned the truth. When the WHI results were released, hormone drug prescriptions
tanked. Importantly, in lock-step with this fall in sales, came a fall in breast cancer rates
in this country. Studies now show that 17,500 fewer breast cancers per year occurred
when women stopped taking these drugs, the greatest decline in breast cancers in the
history of this country. And the only thing that changed was that the prescriptions for
hormone therapy drugs dropped.