Nanodiagnostics and Nanotherapeutics: Building Research Ethics and Oversight

JLME Winter 2012
Award Amount
$914,044
Project Dates
09/30/2009 to 07/31/2012
Principal Investigator

Susan M. Wolf, JD (Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences)

Co-Investigators

Jeffrey McCullough, MD (Dept. of Laboratory Pathology)
Ralph Hall, JD  (Law)
Jeffrey Kahn, PhD (Center for Bioethics)

This project produced the first systematic and comprehensive recommendations on how to protect human participants in research on nanodiagnostics and nanotherapeutics, including drugs, devices, and gene therapy using nano-vectors. Research in nano-medicine is burgeoning, with research on human participants under way, but current research ethics and oversight have not yet adequately addressed key concerns including uncertainty about how to assess risks. The project group used normative, empirical, and policy analysis to evaluate current approaches to nanomedicine research ethics and oversight and generated much-needed recommendations on ethics standards and oversight processes.

Project outcomes