A psychiatrist is expected to be dropped from the medical register after being found guilty of conducting unethical drug tests on mentally ill patients, The Times of London reports. Tonmoy Sharma, a former lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, wrongly recruited patients in unsolicited telephone calls without contacting their nurses or caregivers, according to the General Medical Council. After being paid to conduct the tests by drugmaker, he failed to seek proper approval from medical bodies and then misled the companies about his methods.

He also wrongly described himself as being a professor and falsely claimed that he had a PhD. Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis, among three others, paid him almost $2 million from 1996 to conduct trials of antipsychotics on patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. His position at the institute helped him to secure funding, and the companies that paid for the research were also misled, according to the GMC report.

A report by the GMC’s Fitness To Practise panel concluded last week that Sharma had put mentally unwell patients at risk and ethical rules had been wilfully flouted. The GMC ruling, which examined Sharma’s research over ten years, could force the pharmaceutical industry to reexamine the way in which research on psychiatric drugs is commissioned and conducted.