Six previously healthy medical volunteers have been hospitalised, including one man who is now brain dead after taking part in a botched drug test at a private clinic in western France, the French Health Ministry said on Friday.
The prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into what the French Health Minister Marisol Touraine called "an accident of exceptional gravity ... Without precedence" in France at the Biotrial lab in Rennes. The drug trial, which was testing a new painkiller compound, involved 90 healthy volunteers who were given the experimental drug in varying doses, she told reporters Friday at a news conference in Rennes.