Leading Western pharmaceutical companies paid millions of pounds to former Communist East Germany to use more that 50,000 patients in state-run hospitals as unwitting guinea pigs for drug tests in which several people died, it was revealed...An investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel said international conglomerates such as Bayer, Hoechst [now part of Sanofi], Roche, Schering [now part of Bayer] and Sandoz [now part of Novartis] carried out more than 600 tests on patients, mostly without their knowledge, at hospitals and clinics in the former Communist state. The companies were said to have paid the regime the equivalent of €400,000 (£338,000) per test...The German Federation of Pharmaceutical Producers said: “ There is currently no reason to suspect that anything irregular happened.”