Two months before Guillaume Molinet’s death, another volunteer also suffered a stroke which he survived. A second preliminary investigation is opened in the Biotrial case.
The clinical trial of Biotrial, which caused the death of a volunteer in January 2015, is experiencing a new episode. Le Figaro indeed revealed Monday that the Paris prosecutor’s office had opened a new judicial investigation on the causes of‘Stroke of another volunteer who had participated in the Rennes clinical trial.
It is the public health center of the Paris prosecutor’s office which opened in August 2016, on this case of stroke, a preliminary investigation for “ unintentional injuries ”. The action is, it must be emphasized, completely separate from the investigation currently being carried out by judges on the circumstances of the Rennes clinical trial. The stroke of this volunteer even occurred two months before the death of Guillaume Molinet by atypical vascular lesions with micro-hemorrhages in the brain, linked to the administration of the BIA 10-2474 molecule from the Portuguese manufacturer Bial (tested by Biotrial) . Since June, remember that this case has been the subject of an investigation for “manslaughter and unintentional injury”.
Contradictory conclusions
But what motivated the new investigation were the images of an MRI scan of another volunteer, Patrick Ollive. In November 2015, the man participated in another part of this therapeutic trial. This consisted in absorbing doses of 10 mg of the molecule tested (against 50 mg for Guillaume Molinet and the five other volunteers in his group, all victims of neurological disorders).
In May 2016, journalist Anne Jouan published the images of her MRI. They highlighted a stroke described as old by the Rennes University Hospital, and therefore apparently unrelated to clinical trials at the time. The latter went on to indicate that Patrick Ollive had reported a youthful bicycle accident which could also have explained the trace of stroke, “even if he thought that his stroke was linked to the taking of the test drug”, specifies she does.
In defense, the president of the Biotrial laboratory, Jean-Marc Gandon, told Agence France Presse (AFP): “Whatever the ministerial circulars, whatever the MRIs or other biological examinations, we do not could have detected this endocranial anomaly ”.
Investigations underway at the Rennes police
Anticipating this response, Le Figaro asked two radiologists, a biophysicist and a professor of neurology to review this MRI. One of them, Professor Alain Privat, neurobiologist and member of the Academy of Medicine, indicates that in his eyes the stroke in the image was not old but very recent, and that it dated from the when Patrick Ollive was participating in tests at Biotrial.
This different interpretation of the cliché, which therefore establishes a link with the clinical trial, was surprisingly followed, on May 23, by a second report from the Rennes University Hospital, which this time replaced the adjective “old” by the adjective “recent”. In other words, the Rennes University Hospital also left the door open to a link between the taking of the molecule and the stroke of a voluntary patient.
It is this turnaround or this contradiction in the two opinions of the Rennes University Hospital that motivated, according to Le Figaro, the Paris prosecutor’s office to open this second investigation, restricted to the stroke of Patrick Ollive. The investigations were entrusted to the interregional directorate of the Rennes judicial police.
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