The US Food and Drug Administration stated on Wednesday that Bayer AG was removing remaining supplies of its heart-surgery drug Trasylol from the U.S. market after a long-awaited study found it raised the risk of death compared to two alternatives.

Bayer’s decision to pull its heart-surgery drug from the market came after a Canadian study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the patients given Trasylol had a more than 50 percent higher death rate than patients who got other, cheaper drugs.

In a commentary on the study, Dr. Wayne Ray and Dr. Michael Stein of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee wrote, "Thus, in all likelihood, this is the end of the aprotinin story.” Trasylol, also known by its generic name aprotinin, has been widely used since the 1990s during heart bypass surgery to reduce bleeding.