February 2, 2016 - Bill of Health

The Future of Health Law and Policy: The Petrie-Flom Center’s 10th Anniversary Conference Celebration
March 29, 2016 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East ABC
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

The Petrie-Flom Center is celebrating its first decade and kicking off the next by looking at the future of health law and policy!

Please join us as we bring together Petrie-Flom and other prominent Harvard Law School alumni to discuss major trends, developments, and open questions in the fields of health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics. We’ll hear about the founder’s vision for the Center and the Dean’s perspective on the Center’s influence within the Harvard Law School community and beyond. Center Leadership will discuss what we have accomplished in the first ten years, and more important, our plans for the future. Alan Weil JD ’89, Editor-in-Chief of Health Affairs, will deliver the keynote address.

Agenda

By Mahsa Shabani

Introducing data sharing practices into the genomic research has brought a number of concerns in research ethics and governance to the fore. For instance, research participants and the general public raised concerns about potential privacy issues in personal genomic data protection, as well as the scope of the secondary uses. In order to address such concerns, Data Access Committees (DACs) were seen crucial in the governance of main genomic databases such as the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA). Surprisingly, the component of access review, the structure, and the functionality of such committees have been barely scrutinized to date.

In a recent study published in Genetics in Medicine, we solicited the opinion of 20 DAC members and experts on genomic data access. Specifically, the interviewees were asked about the goals of access review and their experiences with reviewing the ethical and scientific aspects of proposals. The respondents unanimously agreed that the complexity of the access review should correspond with the concerns associated with genomic data sharing. In this regard, privacy risks often seemed possible, yet were not viewed as an imminent threat. The respondents could only recall a few examples of re-identification of genomic data in the past, yet could not promise full privacy protection given the evolving nature of the field. Regardless of the scarcity of such incidents, the controlled-access model is generally considered necessary to maintain public trust. As a DAC member put it: “I think the future of science depends upon high levels of public trust and you can only have high levels of public trust if people feel the data sharing is being managed.” Read More