PAPER NOW AVAILABLE for 11/18 Health Law Workshop w/Aaron Kesselheim

Aaron Kesselheim is a physician and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. He will be speaking at the Petrie-Flom Health Law Workshop on Monday, November 18, at 5:00pm, on “Do March-In Rights Protect Public Interests in Medical Products Arising from Federally-Funded Research?”

For more details on the workshop, including information on how to obtain a copy of the paper, please visit the Petrie-Flom Center’s website.

11/21: Neil Flanzraich on “Responsibility and Integrity in the Pharmaceutical Industry”

Please join the Petrie-Flom Center for a lecture by Neil Flanzraich on responsible pricing strategy, access to care, clinical trial design, outsourcing, and other topics that raise thorny but crucial issues for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.  There will be substantial time for Q&A.

Mr. Flanzraich graduated from HLS in 1968, and was appointed by Dean Martha Minow as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) in fall 2012. He is the Executive Chairman of Kirax Corporation and the Executive Chairman of ParinGenix, Inc., both of which are privately owned biotech companies. He previously served as the Vice Chairman and President of Ivax Corporation, an international pharmaceutical company, which was sold to Teva in 2006 for an enterprise value of $10 billion.

For more information, please visit our website.

PRIM&R 2013 Advancing Ethical Research conference report: Pluripotent Stem Cell Research: Let’s Discuss Informed Consent Lunch

By Melissa LopesFellow, Division of Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School and Director of Research Policy and Compliance, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Harvard University

The DISCUSS project is designed to develop consensus recommendations for the use of stored biospecimens (originally consented for research) to:

  • derive iPSC lines and
  • deposit the derived lines in a cell bank or repository for widespread distribution.

The project represents a formal collaboration of NIH, CIRM and the International Stem Cell Forum. The broadly stated aim of this collaboration is to evaluate consent protocols and ethical requirements in support of ongoing collaborations and the exchange of research materials.

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Call for Abstracts, Petrie-Flom Center 2014 Annual Conference

The Petrie-Flom Center invites abstracts for its 2014 Annual Conference: “Behavioral Economics, Law, and Health Policy.” The conference will be held at Harvard Law School on May 2 and 3, 2014, and seeks to address the following questions:

  • Are there features unique to health and health care that prevent individuals, groups, and policymakers from making the best decisions?  What is a “best” decision, i.e., whose perspective should be paramount?
  • What types of barriers exist to rational decision making in the health care context, and what does rational decision making look like here?
  • Is exploitation of framing effects, default rules, nudges, and other elements of choice architecture appropriate when it comes to human health, or is this an area where pure autonomy should reign – or perhaps strong paternalism is needed? Is health policy special?
  • What should policymakers do when there is conflict between outcomes that might be good for individuals but not society more generally, and vice versa?  Where should the nudges push?
  • Which areas of health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy are most amenable or resistant to manipulation of choice architecture?  When nudges are not plausible, what is the best way to overcome bounded rationality?
  • When might behavioral economics lead to the wrong results for health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy?
  • How can manipulations of choice architecture be best evaluated empirically, and what ethical concerns might such research raise?
  • What are the most interesting or compelling health law, bioethics, and biotechnology policy nudges we should be thinking about today in the realms of obesity, organ donation, end-of-life care, biospecimen ownership and research, human subjects research, HIV testing, vaccination, health insurance, and other areas?

Please note that this list is not meant to be at all exhaustive; we hope to receive papers related to the conference’s general theme but not specifically listed here.

Abstracts are due by December 2, 2013.

For a full conference description, including the call for abstracts and registration information, please visit our website.

11/21: Neil Flanzraich on “Responsibility and Integrity in the Pharmaceutical Industry”

Please join the Petrie-Flom Center for a lecture by Neil Flanzraich on responsible pricing strategy, access to care, clinical trial design, outsourcing, and other topics that raise thorny but crucial issues for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.  There will be substantial time for Q&A.

Mr. Flanzraich graduated from HLS in 1968, and was appointed by Dean Martha Minow as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) in fall 2012. He is the Executive Chairman of Kirax Corporation and the Executive Chairman of ParinGenix, Inc., both of which are privately owned biotech companies. He previously served as the Vice Chairman and President of Ivax Corporation, an international pharmaceutical company, which was sold to Teva in 2006 for an enterprise value of $10 billion.

For more information, please visit our website.

Announcing the New Journal of Law and Biosciences

The Petrie-Flom Center and Harvard Law School are delighted to announce our partnership with Duke University, Stanford University, and Oxford University Press to launch a new peer-reviewed, open access, online journal in 2014: Journal of Law and the Biosciences (JLB).

JLB will become the preeminent outlet to publish cutting-edge scholarship wherever law and the biosciences intersect. The journal will take a broad and interdisciplinary view of these areas, publishing articles on topics generally considered part of bioethics or neuroethics, such as the ethical, legal, and social implications of reproductive technologies, genetics, stem cell research, neuroscience, or human biological enhancement.  At the same time, JLB will be a home for work that speaks directly to legal issues where the biosciences can be involved, such as food and drug regulation, biosciences patent law, scientific evidence, and criminal responsibility.

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Disruptive Innovation and the Rise of the Retail Clinic

By Michael Young

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) projects that by 2025 the United States will face a shortage of 130,600 physicians, representing a near 18-fold increase from the deficit of 7,400 physicians in 2008.  The widening gap between physician supply and demand has grown out of a complex interplay of legal, political, and social factors, including a progressively aging population, Congressionally mandated caps on the number of Medicare-funded residency slots and funding for graduate medical education, and waning interest among medical school graduates in pursuing careers in primary care.

These issues generate unprecedented opportunities for healthcare innovators and entrepreneurs to design solutions that can effectively address widening disparities between healthcare supply and demand, particularly within vulnerable and underserved areas.

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CFP: Perspectives on Abortion, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and Judicial Review

Call for Papers: Intersections in Reproduction:

Perspectives on Abortion, Assisted Reproductive Technologies,

and Judicial Review

Abortion and reproductive technologies have historically occupied separate realms in law, policy, and academia. In spite of some obvious and natural overlap, scholarship exploring the relationship between abortion and assisted reproduction is sparse. In 2014, Judith Daar (Whittier Law School) and Kimberly Mutcherson (Rutgers Law-Camden) will co-guest edit an issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics devoted to articles reflecting on this relationship. JLME is a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

The guest editors are open to a wide range of scholarship from authors steeped in various aspects of reproductive justice, reproductive rights and reproductive technologies who can explore the future of assisted reproduction and abortion as matters of scholarly concern and legal regulation, especially when viewed as part of a larger movement for reproductive rights and reproductive justice. The term reproductive technologies should be interpreted broadly in this context to go beyond IVF and include a range of techniques used in conjunction with assisted methods of conception.

Questions papers might choose to tackle include, but are in no way limited to:

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