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Close window Published online: 25 January 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070122-10 Fresh light thrown on tragic drug trialAnimal tests may have missed danger because monkeys 'too clean'.Michael Hopkin Animal tests had given little sign that the clinical trial in humans would go terribly wrong, landing the experimental subjects in the hospital. Edmond Terakopian/PA. Immunologists have a new theory to explain why the devastating effects of the experimental drug TGN1412 were not spotted in animal tests. The 'superantibody' drug put six volunteers in intensive care in a London hospital last March. Animals used in preclinical tests for TGN1412, researchers now say, lack...

Close window Published online: 5 April 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060503-8 Drug to blame for clinical-trial disaster?Interim report on London case shows no evidence of contamination.Michael Hopkin Too much targetting of T cells may lead to disastrous results.© SPL The drug-trial disaster that put six British patients in intensive care does not seem to have been due to contamination or a failure to follow protocol, says the agency investigating the incident. If the preliminary finding is confirmed, it would indicate that the drug itself caused the negative effects. The interim report by the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA),...

Last week a drug trial gone hideously wrong where volunteers suffered the consequences of an experimental drug, TGN1412, that was injected into them. They were paid £2,000. And now, a sob story is being written up for one of the victim who is a Muslim. . . I can see it now. Muslim fanatics protesting that these were deliberate experimentations on Muslims from an institution that was established in Germany in recognition of a famous Jewish scientist, "The Prince of Science."

The drug trial victim whose head ballooned in size so much that his sobbing girlfriend said he resembled the Elephant Man said he couldn't resist the £2,000 fee for the tests. Mohammed Abdalla, 28, had planned to use his £2,000 fee for being a guinea pig to make his family in Egypt financially secure. He wanted to set up his brother Mahmood in business and look after his father, an imam, and desperately ill mother. Yesterday, as the London bar manager's dreams were disclosed, it emerged that scientists had warned about the damage the drug could do to human tissue...