Making Sense of Clinical Translation: Call for Participants

Call for Participants

Making Sense of Clinical Translation:
Ethical, Regulatory and Policy Challenges for Europe and the US.

International Workshop, Brocher Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland
18-19 May 2015

We hereby invite early career researchers to participate in a workshop on the ethical, regulatory and policy challenges for clinical translation.

Ever more frequently, innovation policies in biomedicine are driven by the idea that alarge and growing volume of biological knowledge is being used to poor effect, as evidenced by the stagnating number of new therapeutic products being introduced on the market (a so-called “translational lag”), leading to calls for more tailored efforts towards clinical translation of research results. The beneficial consequences of fostering bench-to-bedside research are taken to be self-evident. However, important issues loom large on the horizon of clinical translation in terms of fair allocation of public resources, equality in access to health care, and the ethical assessment of new risks for participants in innovative clinical research. So far, those questions and their causal relation to the idea of the ‘translational lag’ have largely been ignored.

To address this gap, instead of taking the translational lag for granted, we propose to make sense of it as a potent discursive device that is able to align the interests and the practices of decision-makers, regulators, industry, scientists, patients and wider publics. Given the potential impact of clinical translation on society and public health we propose that new policy and regulatory approaches to the perceived translational lag in biomedicine call for dedicated scholarly analysis, as do the assumptions underlying the idea of ‘translation’ and its associated socio-legal infrastructures. In this workshop, we seek to develop resources for a more profound and situated analysis of translation and its policies. To do so, the workshop brings together scholars and professionals from medical research, bioethics, science and technology studies and other fields to focus on three important areas of concern around translation: efforts to accelerate translation, re-imagining national priorities to address the translational lag, and rethinking the ethics of risk for patients’ access to medical innovation.

Application for Early Career Scholars
The workshop runs for two days at the premises of the Brocher Foundation on Lake Geneva, Switzerland (Fondation Brocher). During the workshop, we will address each of the three themes outlined above in sessions that consist of a keynote presentation and a panel discussion set up with brief introductory comments and provocations by panel participants. To ascertain wide coverage of emerging themes and perspectives in the study of the ethics, regulation and politics of clinical translation, we open four panel positions to early career researchers. Scholars working on their doctoral dissertations or with less than three years of post-doctoral experience are invited to send us a one-page expression of interest and an abstract of their talk (300 words maximum). In this document, we would like to know more about your background, current research projects and ideas about synergies between your own work and the themes of the workshop.

Room and board will be provided for 4 scholars (within the premises of the Brocher Foundation, on May 17th and 18th, 2015). Limited travel support may also be provided, pending available funds. We invite submissions via erik.aarden@univie.ac.at until Friday, 27 February 2015. Successful applicants will be informed by 10 March.

Travel Awards for Open Science and Responsible Innovation
The present call for participants is issued in collaboration with Fondazione Giannino Bassetti (www.fondazionebassetti.org). As an official supporter of the workshop, FGB will provide a contribution to two of the four panel positions by offering two travel grants to join the event. The grants (up to € 750) will cover documented expenses for travel to reach the venue for scholars who will present original research studies dealing with one of the following sub-themes:

– translational research and responsible innovation
– translational research and open science/open trials

To apply for the grant, please outline in your expression of interest how your paper fits the selected sub-topic.
Please note that, in cases of co-authorship, no more than one award will be granted for each abstract submitted.

Submissions for travel grants sponsored by Fondazione Giannino Bassetti should be sent to: angela.simone@fondazionebassetti.org, as well as to the organizers.
In the subject line, please put "FGB Travel Grant"

For enquiries and further information, please contact Erik Aarden at erik.aarden@univie.ac.at.

The organizing committee,

Erik Aarden, University of Vienna – Austria
Alessandro Blasimme, INSERM – France
Dustin Holloway, Harvard Medical School – United States
Luca Marelli, University of Milan & European Institute of Oncology – Italy

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(immagine: Smoke art – Cubes to smoke di MattysFlicks da Flickr)

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