It was hard to miss the headlines out of the recent American College of Cardiology meeting in Chicago: Vytorin, the blockbuster cholesterol drug combination from Merck and Schering-Plough, had failed to perform any better than a much cheaper generic medication (simvastatin alone) at fighting plaque buildup in arteries in a randomized, double-blind clinical trial.

Less widely reported was the release of angry emails sent by the study's principal investigator, John Kastelein, to a Schering-Plough executive last summer. In the emails, Kastelein warned the company against delaying the release of the trial's results into 2008: “You will be seen as a company that tries to hide something [...] this starts smelling like extending the publication for no other [than] political reasons and I cannot live with that.” Kastelein heads the department of vascular medicine at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The emails were made public on 31 March by US Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, who is investigating the marketing of Vytorin.

Schering-Plough noted in a written statement that at the American College of Cardiology meeting Kastelein “publicly stated that he did not question the motivations or good faith of the company scientists dealing with those issues.” It added that “[t]he study took longer to complete than originally anticipated due to unexpected challenges encountered in ensuring the quality of the reading and analysis of the blinded data.”