Hastings Center News
Committing to Making New Medical Technologies Available Globally
Global health depends in part on access to advances in biological science and technology to forestall and treat disease, but there are discrepancies in access across the United States and the world. A new joint project of The Hastings Center for Bioethics and Rockefeller University aims to improve the global availability of new medical technologies by focusing on steps that can be taken by scientists engaged in early-stage research.
The project is funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Institute for Global Infectious Disease Research at Rockefeller University. Barry S. Coller, physician-in-chief at Rockefeller University, is the principal investigator. The project leader is Karen J. Maschke, a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center. The research team includes Vardit Ravitsky, President of The Hastings Center; Gregory Kaebnick, senior research scholar and director of research at The Hastings Center; and Virginia Brown, a Hastings research scholar.
Advances in biological science and technology have had profound benefits as measured by childhood mortality, disability due to disease, and overall lifespan. The Covid pandemic not only laid bare the discrepancies in access to these advances, it also made plain that a disease outbreak anywhere in the world can have lasting repercussions for the U.S. It thus reinforced the need to rethink the global availability of the technologies and strategies derived from basic biomedical research. As part of this rethinking, all phases of translational research in biomedical sciences should be examined.
This one-year project is designed to better enable scientists engaged in early-stage research to: 1) identify the ethical issues at stake regarding global availability of innovations in health and medicine, 2) understand where in the innovation life cycle ethical issues and value conflicts arise, and 3) assess the contributions that the scientists can make at various stages in the innovation life cycle to support and facilitate global availability of health and medical innovations.
Focusing on early-stage research has the advantage of building in sensitivity to the global impact of innovation when there is time to address accessibility and have an impact. Waiting until a technology is developed can be too late because by then the technology—and the social systems built around it—are harder to modify to meet the needs of individuals in low- and middle-income countries. Basic scientists and early-phase translational investigators are important participants in driving innovation and thus well positioned to shape the norms that guide research, providing a potential multiplier effect.
The research team will initially develop a toolkit that guides scientists to consider questions about the global availability of innovations in health and medicine while engaged in early-stage translational projects. This will be the starting point for the development of additional scholarly activities designed to foster education on the requirements for global access and studies to assess alternative methods to achieve that goal.
