Cobblestones said:
As far as I can tell, the European trials included 117 patients. The US trial was likely of comparable size. I don't know how much of the stuff would be produced for those trials or in anticipation of FDA approval. No matter what, the stuff wasn't ready to be distributed. Lance had only one source to go to. The number of people with access to the supplies was quite limited. I would think it might be relatively easy to find who supplied Armstrong.
Phase III trials typically involve thousands of patients, but given the unique nature of the product, these studies may have been smaller than is typical. It is harder to find a patient population for a drug which relies on traumatic injuries to test it (although I believe one arm of the study was for scheduled surgeries). The Phase III trials for HemAssist were cut short due to the adverse events reported, thus only a small number of patients actually received the stuff. Based on my experience, there would have been at least hundreds, if not a few thousand units on hand at the end of the study. But you are right, unless Baxter makes some kind of announcement, we will not know exactly how much they had left over.
As for where LA could have got it, the list may be relatively small, but far reaching, including production and packaging personnel, warehousing, transport personnel, clinical staff (across multiple sites), doctors with access or laboratory personnel who conducted the release and stability testing. Clinical supplies are generally tracked pretty well these days, from production through patient use, but someone I know in regulatory affairs at a pharma company told me that in the 90s this was not always the case. In fact, they mentioned that regulations for tracking clinical supplies were reinforced in the late 90s due to some instances of people selling the supplies out the back door. Laboratory staff would have the easiest time of providing small numbers of supplies, as they generally receive 2-3 times as much material as they need for testing, and in general, no one checks to make sure the extras are destroyed.