The new heart drug hit the market in 1987 in a blinding flash of pitchmen, promotion and public relations hoo-ha. The product of biotech breakthroughs, TPA was touted as clearly superior to the competition, a clot-busting drug called streptokinase, on the market for 15 years. Though TPA (for tissue plasminogen activator) is 10 times as expensive as the older drug, the majority of U.S. doctors bought the pitch, and the new drug became the favored method of breaking up clots in heart-attack victims. Then last week an international team of researchers reported what some doctors had suspected all along: the fancy...
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