Published: May 15, 2008 09:56 am         

Drug likely to be pulled after study

An anti-bleeding drug probably will stay off the market, experts say, after a rigorous study found patients getting the medication during heart surgery were much more likely to die than patients given other drugs.

Bayer AG, the maker of the drug Trasylol, said it is still deciding what to do and is awaiting details from the Canadian study. Bayer faces dozens of lawsuits claiming Trasylol led to excess deaths and that the company hid evidence of harm.

But experts in Canada and the United States say the study appears to seal the drug's fate, given that several prior studies linked Trasylol to an elevated risk of death after surgery -- and studies that didn't find a higher risk had many weaknesses.

The latest study was the first head-to-head comparison of Trasylol, also known as aprotinin, and two other drugs that surgeons use to prevent massive blood loss during heart surgery. The findings were released Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine.

"In all likelihood, this is the end of the aprotinin story," Wayne A. Ray and C. Michael Stein of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine wrote in an editorial accompanying the study.