Is there a future for patent ethics committees? (360G-Wellcome-080521_Z_06_Z)

The aim of the project is to provide a preliminary exploration of the issues which may arise with the creation of ethics committees attached to national patent offices or the European Patent Office to advise on individual patent applications involving morally sensitive biotechnological inventions. Although the creation of such 'patent ethics committees' (PECs) has been recommended by the European Group on Ethics and the European Parliament and, furthermore, Norway has taken the lead in appointing the first PEC, there is as yet no other international precedent and no systematic analysis of the ambit of operation of such committees or the nature of their possible relationship to existing national and supranational research ethics committees (RECs). The aim of the pilot project would be to identify the potential synergies and tensions, conflicts, duplication or disjunctions that the creation of such committees may generate between the ethical regulatory controls· on research and the additional ethical controls on patents, with a view to providing a map to chart future collaborative research with other leading partners internationally. In terms of methodology, this pilot project will build on the results of an EU funded project on the law and ethics of human embryonic stem cell research (I" January2005 - June 2006), whose preliminary findings have highlighted a possible tension between the proposal to create an ethics review committee attached to the European Patent Office and the existing system of ethical review of biomedical research in Europe. The research fellow will undertake a review of the role of existing national research ethics committees in the UK, Norway, Japan and the US on the oversight of research involving the application of new biotechnologies in biomedical research with human subjects to provide a map of the gaps, loopholes and areas of ethical or legal controversy or uncertainty at institutional and normative level. This will be followed by a comparative analysis to chart a map of the emerging ethical and legal issues regarding the creation of PECs for future consideration.