Legal and Ethical Issues in Healthcare Start-Ups Monday, October 6, 2014 4:00 PM Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East B, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave. The full list of panelists is available on our website here. New healthcare start-ups face a range of legal and ethical challenges as they develop new products and services and solicit…
By Rachel Sachs [Note: I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to write a response to a recent commentary posted on the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum about the FDA’s proposed draft guidance for the regulation of laboratory-developed tests (LDTs), an issue I have previously written about for this blog. My response, which is posted here…
By Rachel Sachs On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a challenge to the public: provide the most accurate forecast of the spread of chikungunya virus in each of the countries in the Pan American Health Organization, win $150,000. Innovation prizes like DARPA’s are increasing in popularity, with public and private entities…
By Ross D. Silverman Earlier this week, the World Health Organization, responding both to the international outcry over the rapidly rising number of Ebola cases and deaths across sub-Saharan Africa (and critiques of the speed of their action), and the news that western health care workers and ministry had found ways to get access to…
By Arthur Caplan As the WHO announced today that medical ethicists will convene next week in New York to discuss the use of experimental medicines in the West African Ebola outbreak, Art Caplan has a timely new opinion piece in the Washington Post asking why only white American victims of the Ebola outbreak have been treated with an experimental…
By Timo Minssen In Part II of this blog on legal issues relating to the revival of phage therapy I discussed the US Supreme Court’s decisions in Myriad and Prometheus, which might present major obstacles to the patentability of phage-related technology (a more detailed analysis of the Myriad and Prometheus decisions is available here). Yet,…
By Timo Minssen Three days ago I commented on a couple of legal issues raised in the recent Nature report “Phage therapy gets revitalized” by Sara Reardon. One challenge concerns the reluctance of pharma companies to broadly invest in the development of phage therapies. As pointed out in the report, this does of course very…
By Rachel Sachs On Thursday, the FDA finally began to take an action that it had been publicly contemplating for over four years: the regulation of laboratory-developed tests (LDTs). In the FDA’s words, LDTs are diagnostic tests which are “designed, manufactured and used within a single laboratory.” There are thousands of LDTs, including very high-profile…
By Timo Minssen Last week I blogged about recent publications concerning the global battle against anti-microbial resistance (AMR). I did not mention a recent paper published in the June 2014 issue of Nature, which describes how European and U.S. researchers and authorities are increasingly considering clinical research in unconventional areas to fight AMR. The news-report…
By Timo Minssen One of my previous blogs discussed the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). I concluded that antimicrobial resistance is a growing and complex threat involving multifaceted legal, socio-economic and scientific aspects. This requires sustained and coordinated action on both global and local levels. A recent medical review on drug resistant tuberculosis supports…
