The New York Times reported that fifty doctors at the Cleveland Clinic, one of the nation’s largest and most respected centers for cardiac care, voted unanimously to curtail use of the drug Natrecor in its clinical settings. The final decision rests in the hands of a clinic committee that will review the doctor’s comments today.

Natrecor is widely used as a treatment for heart failure but has come under intense scrutiny lately after the recent reports in medical journals of increased death rates and kidney failures in heart patients on the drug. Natrecor is a cardiac hormone that dilates vessels so that less blood pools in the heart and lungs, reducing shortness of breath, which is often the most debilitating symptom of heart failure. Despite the warnings about its drug, financial analysts predict that Johnson & Johnson, the drug’s manufacturer, would receive sales in excess of $600 million this year from the treatment.

The Cleveland Clinic was instrumental in banning the painkiller Bextra from its facility several months before the FDA ordered Pfizer to pull the medication off the market.