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'Elephant Man couldn't resist drug test money' by REBECCA ENGLISH, Daily Mail
07:39am 20th March 2006
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.
They discovered it had an adverse affect on human cells, but astonishingly this did not prevent it being tested on people.
It has also emerged that researchers tried out the drug on monkeys, and their necks swelled up.
The revelations came as a friend of Mohamed said that he had regarded the £2,000 fee as too good to miss.
He said: "Usually the drug companies pay a few hundred quid, but this was a bit of a jump. But he laughed off the risk.
"I was really worried. I told him that no one would offer that much money if they didn't know there was a huge risk attached. But he said he needed the money to pay off debts."
The drug, TGN1412, which is designed to beat rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia and multiple sclerosis, left them writhing in agony with their heads "ballooning" in size.
Mohamed and 21-year-old plumber Ryan Wilson are still fighting for their lives in intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital in North West London a week after the trial went wrong.
The side-effects made Mohamed's head swell so hideously that his girlfriend, Myfanwy Marshall, compared him to the Elephant Man.
Six volunteers were given doses of TGN1412 and suffered violent reactions which made their immune systems attack their internal organs. There was some progress in the condition of the other guinea pigs yesterday with three of them being taken off life support machines.
Last night, a close friend of Mohamed in Cairo told the Mail: "I last spoke to him two weeks ago and there was no mention of the medical trials.
"But he did say that he was planning to come to Egypt in the summer with a big surprise for his younger brother Mahmood that he hoped would set him up financially for life. It is so tragic if that is why he is in the situation he is in now."
Only Mohamed's father has been informed of the disaster, and he is keeping it from his two sisters, brother and mother.
The friend said: "His mother has got a very serious heart condition, so serious that we have no doubt that it would kill her to know what has happened to him."
Mohamed married a British woman in Egypt four years ago, but they divorced and, his friend said, the settlement cost him his savings.
He said: "Mohamed was fond of his family and adored children and wanted children of his own. But his wife was reluctant because it would have involved converting to Islam. When they divorced, he was forced to give her his life savings as part of the settlement." He added: "Mohamed is loved by everyone, always the one in the group resolving disputes, always wanting everyone to get along."
Mohamed, deputy manager of the Heads and Tails bar in Farringdon, Central London, lived in a small flat in Kensington with his friend Gamal Ragab, 28, a PhD student who also works as a restaurant manager.
Karwan Najim, who knows both men, said: "Ragab is really upset and has been visiting the hospital every day. Mohamed is a really happy guy, always really nice and polite to me."
One expert said yesterday the six men may never fully recover.
Professor Trevor Smart, head of pharmacology at University College London, said that as well as any permanent damage to their organs, there could be long-term disruption to their immune systems.
The tests on monkeys were carried out in Germany, where the drug's manufacturer TeGenero is based. Professor Johannes Loewer, president of the Paul Ehrich Institute, which monitored the research, said: "There were adverse effects in certain doses. Some of the monkeys developed an increase in the lymph nodes." He added: "No monkeys died to our knowledge."
An earlier alert about TGN1412 came four years ago. A study published in 2002 in the US medical journal Clinical Immunology warned that it adversely affected human cells.
TeGenero has insisted that "extensive preclinical tests showed no sign of any risk".
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