Human lab rats loan bodies to science for cash

By Melba Newsome

updated 12:38 p.m. ET April 27, 2008

Brandon L., 30, spent a good part of the summer of 2007 in a sterile research facility. He shared a sparse dormitory room with a semiretired prison guard, a massage therapist who liked to tell S&M stories, and a man with a taste for sappy, made-for-TV movies. Despite the little the four men had in common, they got along well, except for the occasional squabble over the TV remote. Brandon, the guard, and bondage boy would want to watch "Cops," but the sappy guy preferred Lifetime.

Every day started and ended the same way: lights on at 5 a.m. and off at midnight. In the intervening hours, the medical staff delivered three meals and took away blood, urine, and fecal samples.

It wasn't some ultracontagious disease that kept these men in quarantine; their confinement was self-imposed. In fact, Brandon and his roommates were professional guinea pigs who volunteered to take part in a medical trial at Ohio State University to determine how an experimental antinausea pill would interact with an existing antifungal medication. In exchange for allowing themselves to be used as human pincushions, they each received $3,000.

In the past 18 months, Brandon has traveled throughout Michigan, Indiana, and Texas to submit himself to medical experimentation. He has earned roughly $25,000. Not bad for a man whose previous career trajectory consisted of being fired from one part-time, minimum-wage job after another.

"This is the longest I've ever done anything," says Brandon. "I don't plan on doing it forever, but it sure beats the heck out of working at a regular job."

Every year, millions of Americans loan their bodies to science. Some are desperate to find a cure for what ails them. Others who are healthy just participate in the occasional study for some extra cash. But many are like Brandon: They're healthy, and they dump low-paying jobs for a career as a professional lab rat. In exchange for undergoing trial treatments, they receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. The more time and inconvenience involved, the more money they stand to earn. One 4-month NASA study in Galveston, Texas, paid $17,200. So what if you couldn't get out of bed for 90 days?

But the problem arises from the other things a career guinea pig will do for money. In a Johns Hopkins survey of research volunteers published last spring in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 10 percent of the sampled group admitted to participating in more than one study at a time — most likely without the knowledge of the researchers.

Drug trials by the numbers $400 million: Amount spent in 2007 to recruit participants for clinical trials 90: Until the 1970s, percentage of all experimental medications tested on inmates 1 in 10,000: Number of human guinea pigs who will suffer a fatal side effect from the drug they're testing 70: Percentage of U.S. clinical trials that are delayed due to a shortage of qualified volunteers 30: Percentage of trials that aren't regulated by the FDA or the Office for Human Research protections 3: Average number of prescription drugs withdrawn every two years

In any other line of work this would be called moonlighting, but in clinical trials it's Russian roulette. Consider this scenario: A man decides he can secretly juggle his role as a rat for a new headache medicine with his position as pincushion for an STD vaccine. On the surface, there's no harm. But inside the man's body, the two drugs interact in completely unpredictable ways. Maybe nothing will happen. Or maybe he'll experience life-threatening side effects, some of which will hit him immediately and others of which may take years to show up. Ultimately, the cost to his health will be as random as the spin of a gun cylinder. 

So why should you care that some folks are willing to turn their bodies into test tubes to make a buck? Because these guinea pigs may be gambling with your life, too.

Drug recalls
The results of clinical trials are used to help researchers (and later the FDA) determine if a drug is safe and effective for the general population. If those results are skewed by a significant number of volunteers enrolling in multiple studies, it's possible that either a worthy drug will be kept out of people's hands, or a dangerous and/or ineffective med will be allowed to enter the market. In the latter case, you the consumer become the guinea pig.

Since 2000, some highly touted drugs, including Rezulin, Baycol, Bextra, and Vioxx, have been recalled by the FDA or pulled from the market by their manufacturers following reports of serious side effects or patient deaths. It's impossible to know if any of those recalls were the result of tainted trials, but the possibility exists. 

"If these professional patients don't disclose that they're taking a drug [in another study] that is contraindicated with the new experimental medicine, consumers can end up having drug interactions, which kill 100,000 people every year," says Richard Gabriel, CEO of DNAPrint Genomics, a drug-development company focused on gene-based pharmaceuticals.

Nancy Kass, Sc.D., the lead author of the Johns Hopkins study, agrees. "This is the kind of thing researchers worry about a lot, because it affects the research and can endanger volunteers," she says. "In one institution, it's easy to keep track of who's in what study. But if you go to Duke one week and the University of North Carolina the next week, who would know?"

Not a soul, in part because the double-dippers have federal regulations on their side. "The government requires that personal information that could identify research participants be kept confidential," says Kass. As a result, there's little chance of catching volunteers who skirt the rules, and that includes people who keep quiet about past or current physical conditions that have the potential to skew study results.

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