From an early stage, a significant number of our partners in low- and middle-income settings expressed a strong interest in building local capacity in ethics research.
To support our partners need for easy access to ethics advice, support and research, our ethics team:
- Led workshops and training sessions on important ethical issues in partner institutions in Africa and Southeast Asia, in order to ensure high ethical standards and to develop network-wide policies
- Secured funding from Wellcome Trust and other funders to support five doctoral students from Africa and Southeast Asia to carry out ethics research on topics such as:
- Use of ethnicity data
- Benefit-sharing
- Collection and export of biological samples from Africa
- Duties of researchers and health professionals when malaria research generates information about sickle-cell status
- Ethical issues arising in research in emergency settings
The success of this doctoral programme – and the in-depth experience working with MalariaGEN – helped the Ethox Centre and its partners in Africa and Southeast Asia to secure a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to fund a five-year programme of ethics research and capacity building with Wellcome Trust’s Major Overseas Programmes in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand-Laos, and Vietnam. Awarded in 2012, this funding was also used to form the Global Health Bioethics Network (GHBN).
Publications
- Parker M, Kwiatkowski DP. The ethics of sustainable genomic research in Africa. Genome Biology. 2016 17:44 DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-0914-3.
- De Vries J, Bull SJ, Doumbo OK, Ibrahim M, et al. Ethical issues in human genomics research in developing countries. BMC Medical Ethics. 2011: 12(5). doi: 10.1186/1472-6939-12-5.