Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Wyeth paid a company to ghostwrite medical journal articles about its hormone therapy products and seek academic scientists to sign them as authors, a U.S. senator said.

Documents from lawsuits suggest the drugmaker hired DesignWrite Inc. of Princeton, New Jersey, to draft manuscripts related to the Wyeth products and breast cancer risks, according to letters released today from Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa to the companies. Wyeth makes the hormone replacement drugs Prempro and Premarin.

Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been examining drugmakers’ efforts to influence doctors and scientists. In the letters, which seek information about the arrangement between Wyeth and DesignWrite, Grassley raised alarm that those listed as authors weren’t deeply involved in drafting manuscripts.

“Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling,” Grassley wrote to Wyeth, based in Madison, New Jersey.

Grassley’s inquiry appears to reflect arguments that have been used in court cases against Wyeth and were “rejected by judges and juries alike,” said Michael Lampe, a Wyeth spokesman, in a telephone interview. The company will provide a “full response” to Grassley, Lampe said.

“The authors of the articles in question, none of whom were paid, exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content,” Lampe said.

At DesignWrite, a medical communications company, nobody who answered the phone would identify themselves to comment.

Legal Claims

Wyeth as of Oct. 29 faced about 8,700 legal claims from women in the U.S. who contend the hormone replacement drugs caused breast cancer and other injuries, according to a company regulatory filing last month.

Merck & Co. has also been criticized for hiring companies to ghostwrite reports. Merck conducted studies on the pain pill Vioxx, then hired companies to produce reports for medical journals that appeared under the names of other scientists, according to an analysis of court documents published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April.

The documents disclosed by Merck in two Vioxx lawsuits suggested the company’s control of the data allowed it to downplay the risk of death from Vioxx in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the journal’s editors said in an editorial.

To contact the reporters on this story: Justin Blum in Washington at jblum4@bloomberg.net; Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: December 12, 2008 17:33 EST