Leading Western pharmaceutical companies paid millions of pounds to former Communist East Germany to use more that 50,000 patients in state-run hospitals as unwitting guinea pigs for drug tests in which several people died, it was revealed today.
An investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel said international conglomerates such as Bayer, Hoechst, Roche, Schering and Sandoz carried out more than 600 tests on patients, mostly without their knowledge, at hospitals and clinics in the former Communist state.
The companies were said to have paid the regime the equivalent of €400,000 (£338,000) per test. Schering, a concern which now belongs to Bayer, was said to have offered East Germany the equivalent of €3m to carry out a series of tests at an East Berlin hospital.
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