Special Report: Big Pharma's Global Guinea Pigs
The Polish port city of Gdansk is famous for its shipyards. Hungary's fifth largest city, Pecs, is known for its ancient architecture and brewery. Neither is particularly renowned for medicine. Yet when AstraZeneca Plc tested its big new drug hope Brilinta on heart attack patients in a major clinical study, it was hospitals in these places that enrolled some of the highest number of patients anywhere in the world. In fact, Poland and Hungary together accounted for 21 percent of all subjects studied in the pivotal 18,000-patient trial -- more than double the United States and Canada combined.