A DOCTOR who had been internationally renowned for his medical research has been struck off for "persistent and wide-ranging dishonesty".

Tonmoy Sharma, registered at the Clinical Neuroscience Research Centre in Priory Hill, Dartford, tested drugs on volunteers without ethical approval and misled colleagues about his qualifications.

The 42-year-old recruited mentally ill patients as guinea pigs for research without contacting their carers and falsely claimed to have the backing of ethics committees for a number of studies.

And the psychiatrist, who called himself a professor despite never completing his PhD thesis, was banned from working as a doctor by the General Medical Council (GMC) on Monday.

GMC panel chairman Andrew Popat told Mr Sharma his conduct had damaged public and commercial confidence in medical research.

He said: "Your persistent and wide-ranging dishonesty and untruthfulness, spanning a number of years, together with your lack of insight, is so serious it is fundamentally incompatible with your continuing to be a registered medical practitioner."

Mr Sharma qualified in India in 1987 and developed an international reputation for his research into drugs for mental health problems.

He pulled in thousands of pounds in research grants for the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, University of London, and from pharmaceutical firms for research on their products.

The GMC found him to have acted unprofessionally in relation to five major studies between 1997 and 2003 involving four different pharmaceutical companies.

In 2003, he recruited vulnerable mental health patients for research via unsolicited telephone calls and without consent from their doctors.

He also failed to give them proper information about what they were getting into. One schizophrenic was simply handed a leaflet.

From 1999 onwards, Mr Sharma was dishonest with drug maker Sanofi over a schizophrenia study.

He falsely claimed research had full ethics approval and did not reveal his own company was running the study.

Joanna Glynn, for the GMC, said Dr Sharma was "guilty of gross breaches of the research standards".

Dr Sharma represented himself at the hearing and denied the bulk of the charges, including allegations his conduct was dishonest, unprofessional and unethical.

He insisted he "believed in ethics in medicine".