When Drug Trials Go Wrong

          Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting story by Sarah Rubenstein titled “When Drug Trials Go Wrong, Patients Have Little Recourse.” The story recounts the experience of Suzanne Davenport who was the subject in a clinical trial testing drugs for Parkinson’s disease. As a result, she is wheelchair bound and living in a nursing home. The story makes mention of the cases we have filed on behalf of injured human subjects.

         The article notes that the consent form Ms. Davenport signed promised: "If you are injured as a direct result of research procedures, you will receive treatment at no cost." Yet when Ms. Davenport’s family wrote to the researchers requesting that they pay for her treatment, they did not receive a favorable response.

          Too often researchers and their sponsors fail to care for the human subjects in their trials when an adverse event occurs. If they would do so in the first instance, they might avoid the litigation that is sure to follow.

Alan Milstein