 Rosuvastatin chemical structure Rosuvastatin is marketed by the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca with the brand name Crestor.
Several months after its introduction in Europe, Richard Horton, the editor of the medical journal The Lancet, criticised the way Crestor had been introduced. "AstraZeneca's tactics in marketing its cholesterol-lowering drug, rosuvastatin, raise disturbing questions about how drugs enter clinical practice and what measures exist to protect patients from inadequately investigated medicines," according to his editorial. The Lancet's editorial position is that the data for CrestorÂ’s superiority relies too much on extrapolation from the lipid profile data and too little on hard clinical endpoints, which are available for other statins. The manufacturer responded by claiming that few drugs had been tested so successfully on so many patients. Sir Tom McKillop, AstraZeneca's CEO called the editorial "flawed and incorrect" and slammed the journal for making "such an outrageous critique of a serious, well-studied medicine."
Many doctors have been hesitant to prescribe rosuvastatin because studies have suggested that this drug has a higher incidence of rhabdomyolysis (a severe undesired side effect) than other statins.
Currently the main competition for Crestor is Vytorin by Merck & Co. (a combination of simvastatin and ezetimibe), and currently there are no published studies showing which of the two drugs is more effective.
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