INDIANAPOLIS — Traci Johnson believed it was God's plan for her to leave home to attend a tiny Bible college here -- and she prayed every day for the Lord to provide for her tuition.
Then an unusual opportunity presented itself.
Eli Lilly & Co., the pharmaceutical giant headquartered a few miles from Indiana Bible College, was seeking healthy subjects for a live-in clinical drug trial. The 19-year-old freshman told her friends back home in Pennsylvania that the study was her best hope to stay in school.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday April 03, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Drug trial suicide -- An article in Friday's Section A about a young woman's suicide during a test of an antidepressant incorrectly gave the name of Indiana University as the University of Indiana.
"Trace, that don't sound right," her friend Colleen Jacoby told her. "I never heard of a human guinea pig."
But the students at the Bible college knew all about the trials. They made perfect subjects for studies requiring healthy people -- and they were used often, receiving hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a few weeks work.
If accepted into the study, she could make $150 a day for 49 days -- more than a year's worth of her school expenses -- for taking a drug known as duloxetine, an antidepressant that had already been given to thousands of people and was on the verge of approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
She had faith that God would find a way. "It was in his hands," she wrote in her diary.
Just before the new semester, a Lilly representative called. Her prayers were answered.
A month later, she was dead.
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Indiana Bible College is on the outskirts of Indianapolis, in a former hospital. With 260 students, it is a tight-knit community of Pentecostals. TV is banned and girls are required to wear long skirts. It's not unusual to see students drop their knapsacks and form an impromptu circle, praying for a sick aunt or alcoholic cousin.
For Johnson it was a sanctuary.
She grew up in blue-collar Bensalem, Pa., but the center of her childhood was a Pentacostal church in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood. Every Wednesday morning, she walked with the pastor past bars and discount stores canopied by train tracks. They huddled around prostitutes and drug addicts. She prayed so hard for them that tears rolled down her cheeks.
Then last summer, she announced that the Lord had told her to attend Bible school.
"She just went wherever the Lord was leading her," said Kathy DePalma, who ran the Christian day-care center where Johnson had worked.
When friends came to visit in Indianapolis, Johnson chattered about the college's football team, her new church and the young men who had caught her eye.
"I think my highest want right now is the person who Jesus wants me with," she noted in her diary soon after starting school, "someone I can pray with."
In a school essay, she envisioned herself as a preacher's wife, raising her children and sitting in the first pew of church.
All she needed was $3,470 a semester. She had arrived with little money, and her father had recently lost his job as a machinist.
"I REALLY REALLY REALLY need you to open a way for me to pay my bill," she wrote to God in her diary. "Please provide a way."
One Final Trial
A few miles from the Bible college, the neon logo of Eli Lilly glows atop the company's headquarters in south Indianapolis.
In 1972, a Lilly biochemist discovered that a patented chemical, fluoxetine, enhanced the action of the brain chemical serotonin, which affects mood. More testing showed the chemical could dissolve feelings of despair and sadness.
The FDA approved the drug, Prozac, in 1987 and since then, sales have totaled more than $21 billion. But by the late 1990s, the patent on Prozac was about to expire, and the company needed a sequel. Lilly began looking at duloxetine, a patented agent that not only affects serotonin, like Prozac, but also norepinephrine, another brain chemical.
Duloxetine had been shelved in the early 1990s, in part because low doses had no effect on depression. But higher doses, Lilly scientists discovered, relieved depression at least as well as Prozac. Subsequent testing proved the drug also curbed stress-related urinary incontinence.
By 2003 Lilly had a trade name, Cymbalta, and industry analysts were projecting sales of $2.5 billion a year for depression alone, a figure rivaling the high-water mark for Prozac.
The drug already had been tested in 8,500 people, but the FDA wanted one last clinical trial to measure its effect on heart rhythm. It would use doses as much as up to five times that recommended for incontinence, and six times the dose for depression.
Lilly needed 100 healthy females between 18 and 75 (women are more prone to incontinence) for seven weeks.
The inventors of Prozac had their sequel. They just had to complete one last trial.
A Great Fundraiser
Lilly's human test clinic, located at the University of Indiana Medical Center, is a resort-like facility with a library, rooftop sundeck and a panoramic view of downtown. "I felt I was on a mini-vacation," reads one testimonial on the clinic's website.
The site touts the drug trials as a great way for schools, churches and community organizations to raise money.
