Medical groups are being inundated with people wanting to sign up for drug trials despite the disastrous tests at Northwick Park hospital that left two men fighting for their lives and four others seriously ill.
The Medical Research Council, a government-funded body that is running more than 350 trials of drugs for conditions as diverse as cancer and mental disorders, said there had been a surge of interest from people keen to take part in trials and inquiring about the payments volunteers can receive.
Private companies involved in clinical trials of drugs also claimed to be experiencing more interest in forthcoming trials, with a sharp rise in the number of calls from potential volunteers.
The reaction has perplexed many working in the field who feared the events of the trial at the hospital in Harrow, north London, which was carried out by the US company Parexel, would trigger a slump in volunteers signing up for future trials.
Six healthy young men taking part in the trial at Northwick Park suffered a massive inflammatory reaction to an experimental drug called TGN1412.
Four of them regained consciousness yesterday, but two others were in a critical condition.
"The industry has been very concerned this would have a negative impact on clinical trials, but the odd thing is more people seem to be showing an interest," said Dr Roberto Solari, chief executive of Medical Research Council Technology in Cambridge. "I don't think people realised there was money to be made."
Damian Gough of the website EnterTrials, which allows people to register for upcoming clinical trials said web traffic to the site had increased threefold.
Beforehand, he added, an average of 25 people a day used the site to sign up for trials, a number which has since leapt to 90 a day. "It's totally not what I expected. My initial reaction what that it was going to be detrimental to the industry as a whole," he said.
A similar picture emerged at Hammersmith Medicines Research, a clinical trials company based at the Central Middlesex hospital in Park Royal, London.
Yesterday, staff at the company returned 90 calls to potential volunteers who had left their details on a designated answering machine, a figure the company's clinical director, Dr Malcolm Boyce, said was above average.
The investigation by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency into what went wrong in the Northwick trial continued yesterday as government officers seized documents from Parexel's offices while representatives from the MHRA bagged samples and conducted interviews with staff at the UK premises of Parexel, the company employed by a German drug company to trial its drug.
Ganesh Suntharalingham, the clinical director of intensive care at Northwick, said he had convened an "expert advisory panel" to develop a more detailed understanding of what had happened to the young men.
Yesterday Parexel released a statement from its US-based website, saying that an initial internal investigation had shown that "best practices were followed" at its trials unit.
