VORTRAG: A Catalog of Moral Inefficiencies in Drug Development

Vortrag
A Catalog of Moral Inefficiencies in Drug Development

Zeit: 26. Juni 2024, 16:00-17:30 Uhr
Ort: Seminarraum EGM (Humboldtallee 36)

Vortragender: Prof. Dr. Jonathan Kimmelman (McGill University, Canada)
Veranstalter: Institute of Advanced Studies for Ethics of the Sciences

Bio:
Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD, is James McGill Professor of Biomedical Ethics at McGill University. His research group, STREAM (Studies in Translation, Ethics and Medicine) uses empirical and theoretical methods to understand the ethical, policy, and scientific dynamics of developing new drugs. Kimmelman received the Maud Menten New Investigator Prize (2006), a CIHR New Investigator Award (2008), a Humboldt Bessel Award (2014), and was elected a Hastings Center Fellow (2018).  He has sat on various advisory bodies within the U.S. NHLBI and NIAID, served for four tours of duty on U.S. National Academies of Medicine committees, and chaired the International Society of Stem Cell Research Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation revision task force 2015-16. His research has been covered in major media outlets, including NPR’s All Things Considered, STATNews, and Nature. Kimmelman is deputy editor at Clinical Trials, and associate editor at Med.

Abstract:
Drug development is notoriously risky and failure prone: companies spend in excess of $2 billion to bring a single drug to market. Less widely appreciated is that animals and patients that participate in research also bear a substantial amount of risk and burden in drug development, and much of this sacrifice is gratuitous. In this talk, I will present a map of drug development that surfaces its moral and scientific dimensions. I will further argue that researchers, regulators, medical centres and funders bear obligations to economize on the sacrifices animals and patients are asked to make in drug development. I will then use my moral map of drug development to describe three broad levels of moral inefficiency in drug development (and practices that tax moral efficiencies at each of these levels). The first level is experimental moral inefficiency (e.g. using more people and/or animals than necessary to resolve a medical hypothesis). The second is trajectory level moral inefficiency (e.g. using people and animals than necessary to determine whether to accept or reject a novel treatment). The third is program-level moral inefficiency (e.g. using more people and animals than needed to discover an effective strategy for a given condition). I will close by describing various practical and policy-level tools for reducing moral inefficiencies in drug development.

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Für eine online-Teilnahme wird um Anmeldung bei jan.hinrichsen(at)med.uni-goettingen.de gebeten.