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The cost of disciplinary action against the researchers who sparked a health scare over the MMR vaccine is likely to exceed £1million, The Times has learnt.

The General Medical Council (GMC), the medical regulator, is now looking to overhaul its disciplinary procedures to reduce mounting costs as the case against Dr Andrew Wakefield, the longest running in the council's history, reconvenes today.

Dr Wakefield and two colleagues face charges of serious professional misconduct over their research, which claimed a link between autism in children and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR).

Their findings, based on a study of 12 children, have since been discredited. Subsequent research failed to find any health risks in giving children MMR.

Dr Wakefield's research has been blamed for a large drop in a vaccination rates, which allowed a resurgence of measles cases in Britain last year.

Dr Wakefield and professors John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, formerly of the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, were subsequently investigated and accused of acting unethically and dishonestly in the conduct of their original study, published in The Lancet medical journal in February 1998.

They all deny the allegations in the case, which began in July 2007 and was expected to last only six weeks. It will now conclude in August — sitting for a record 120 days in intermittent sessions.

The GMC has refused to estimate the exact cost of the hearing but analysis of the basic fees for the five members of a fitness-to-practise panel — each earning £300 a day — plus £500 a day for a legal assessor, suggests that it will cost more than £240,000.

With the expense of employing Sally Smith, an experienced QC, to prosecute the case for the GMC, as well as QCs and legal teams for each of the three doctors, the total cost is likely to run into at least seven figures, a GMC source confirmed.

Paul Philip, the GMC's director of standards, said that there had been a number of long-running cases in recent years but these remained an exception. He said that the average length of a GMC fitness-to-practise hearing had also risen in the last two years, due to an increasingly complex caseload and complaints about rogue or incompetant doctors.

“Overall the length of hearings have increased, from 4.7 days in 2006 to 6.7 days in 2008,” he said, adding that longer hearings required more doctors and lay members to sit on an adjudicating panel.

In the past two years an increasing proportion of complaints about doctors had come from the police and the NHS, rather than patients, Mr Philip added: “Those cases threaten doctors' employment and allege more serious issues about the doctor's practice because the employers know more about it.

Other hearings could be lengthy because they came down to differences of medical opinion, or complicated clinical decisions which had to be assessed by expert witnesses, he added.

By 2011, the GMC will lose the ablity to adjudicate cases, and will simply become a prosecutor against medical misconduct under legislation currently going through Parliament.

Sir Graeme Catto, the GMC chairman, said that before the changes it wanted to make “fitness-to-practise procedures slicker and less cumbersome both for the public but also for the doctors themselves.”

Proposals being put out to consultation by the Council include measures to dismiss certain complaints as frivolous or vexatious and to increase the number of cases where doctors voluntarily restrict their own practice rather than suffer conditions imposed by the GMC.

The reforms would not prevent the most serious allegations from being investigated or going to a full hearing where necessary, the GMC said.

The Medical Protection Society, which is representing Dr Wakefield, declined to comment on the costs of the hearing.

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