The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University co-sponsored a conference exploring the issue of financial conflicts of interest at research universities in November 2012. The conference resulted in a final report, which is now available for download on the Petrie-Flom Center’s website. From the report:
In the latter 1990s, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the now-named Government Accountability Office (GAO) sharply questioned the trustworthiness of research universities as stewards of federal research funds and overseers of the research, especially research that involved human subjects, when the institutions themselves increasingly had financial interests in research conducted by their faculty scientists. This was the first time the federal government had expressed concerns about institutional fCOIs in research universities and academic medical centers.
These concerns have only intensified in the ensuing years as research universities have been exhorted with increasing urgency to become ever more deeply engaged with industry in accelerating the translation of their faculties’ inventive research into tangible public benefits. Defining, let alone mitigating, institutional fCOIs in research universities becomes especially challenging as the institutions, in response to expanding and intensifying public expectations, progressively accrete missions that may themselves not be concordant.
This Symposium, organized by Professor David Korn and co-sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, was intended to examine, clarify, and deepen our understanding of institutional fCOIs in the contemporary research university, and thereby help to identify effective measures that will ensure the continuing trustworthiness of these vital institutions.
For more, download the full report here.
