A doctor who killed her sister with an injection of an unlicensed drug has been told she will be struck off the medical register after being found guilty of professional misconduct.
Dr Yvonne Pambakian injected Yolanda Cox, 22, with a massive dose of the drug, which had been invented by their mother.
She also injected her mother and agreed to use the drug to treat a women who was dying of cancer despite the lack of evidence that it would have any benefit, a disciplinary panel was told.
All three women were given four times the normal dose of the drug, which had been subject to just two small-scale human tests in the Netherlands.
Dr Pambakian halted the treatments only when her sister, who had recently graduated from Oxford University, suffered a fatal allergic reaction to the drug at the family home in Hampstead, North London, in May 2007.
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She was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter but prosecutors decided not to pursue charges.
The General Medical Council fitness to practice panel has now ruled that she should be struck off the medical register because of the risk of a repeat of “the blinkered thinking and shortcuts”.
The panel said that she had allowed her “unshakeable” belief in her mother’s drug to cloud her medical judgment.
Her mother, Dr Arpi Matossian-Rogers, had spent more than a decade developing the drug, known as B-71, which she believed would treat conditions related to insulin resistance.
Dr Pambakian, 40, was the medical director of the company that has spent more than £3 million developing the drug and believed that it could help treat a range of conditions including asthma, cancer and high cholesterol.
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She initially insisted that B-71 was suitable for the medical conditions of all three women but during the course of the hearing changed her plea and admitted that it was not “clinically indicated” in any of the cases.
The fitness to practice panel heard that Dr Pambakian began using the drug as a “treatment” when a fellow director asked her if she would help a shareholder’s relative who had terminal cancer.
The director also said that pressure from shareholders for the company to begin making a profit from the trial drug was “hotting up”.
Dr Pambakian said that she agreed to treat Catherine Clayton at her home without informing her GP or hospital because the 33-year-old mother of four young children had “begged” to receive the drug after being told she had just eight weeks to live.
“I was not there to use her a guinea pig,” she told the hearing.
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The disciplinary panel found, however, that the doctor’s judgment was likely to have been “clouded” by enthusiasm for the drug even though her belief was not supported by the best evidence.