Bioethics

Clinical Trials Regulation in India

An op-ed from our friends Mark Barnes and Barbara Bierer at Harvard’s Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center on recent legal changes to India’s clinical trial requirements, arguing that using the clinical trial context to promote a social or political policy agenda in India may sacrifice scientific integrity in the service of social justice.  A quick snippet: The overbreadth…

An op-ed from our friends Mark Barnes and Barbara Bierer at Harvard’s Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center on recent legal changes to India’s clinical trial requirements, arguing that using the clinical trial context to promote a social or political policy agenda in India may sacrifice scientific integrity in the service of social justice.  A quick snippet:

The overbreadth of these requirements, and how poorly tailored they are to achieve the specific goal of protecting clinical trial participants from risks directly caused by trials themselves, leaves one wondering whether the regulatory authorities fully comprehend the clinical trial process and the nuances of complex medical and biological processes. One further wonders whether what animates these measures may be less a concern for specific justice in individual cases than the goal of righting social wrongs and achieving social justice, unrelated to but prompted by clinical trial experiences. Achieving social justice and a more just allocation of social resources may be completely laudable – even desirable – as social or political policy, but unconsciously using the clinical trial context to promote this agenda threatens to corrupt science and to undermine health, with results that may create more social distress than social justice.

Read the full piece here.

And more commentary from MRCT on this issue: