Clinical Trials Go Offshore

As with so many other business endeavors, clinical trials are often outsourced to developing countries with cheap workers and few regulations.

The upside? Cheaper drug development. The downside? Situations like this:

Russian prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into vaccine trials by British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC that were allegedly conducted on children without parents' permission. [...]

Prosecutors said the deputy director of the hospital had been paid $50,000 to participate in the trials and that such tests on minors were illegal in Russia. They also said parents had been told the vaccines were humanitarian aid.

GlaxoSmithKline officials could not be immediately reached for comment, but Michael Crow, the head of GSK's Russian operations, told Dow Jones Newswires that the allegations were unsubstantiated and untrue.

Russian prosecutors probe vaccine trials [AP]