Two years after the warning from Professor Roberts, an incident took place in the spring of 2006 that made the news worldwide. In testing a new drug on healthy voluntary test persons, severe side effects occurred. The drug TGN 1412 from the Würzburg, Germany firm TeGenero, which was founded due to the initiative of Professor Thomas Hünig of the Institute for Virology und Immunology at the University of Würzburg, led to acute problems in all test persons who received the drug. In part they had to be treated for days in intensive care units. Several are still suffering under long-term effects.

After exacting tests, the British experts traced the massive side effects to the medication itself. Contaminants and production mistakes were ruled out. The previously conducted animal experiments were carried out with much larger amounts of the drug than were given to the test persons. Nevertheless, the animal testing gave no indication that side effects were to be expected in humans, and thus, also no safety. Even the German Medical Paper admitted that based on the effects of TGN 1412, animal testing would not give the safety that had been hoped from it.

TGN 1412 was not an isolated case. There are many unwanted effects of medications, which are not seldom fatal. Examples of this are the cholesterol-lowering drug »Lipobay« and the pain killer »VIOXX«, both of which were long considered to be safe, until noticeably many people died after taking the medications. According to the estimates of experts, there are circa 210,000 admissions to German hospitals every year that can be traced by to the side effects of medication. Of these, approximately 60,000 are fatal. This averages out to about 164 deaths per day in Germany that are caused by the side effects of medication.