Biotech Ethics

From The Telegraph: Artificial life ‘could be created within five years’

Laboratories across the world are closing in on a “second genesis” – an achievement that would be one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
Prof David Deamer, from California University, said although building a new lifeform from scratch is a daunting task he is confident it can happen in five to 10 years.

He said: “The momentum is building – we’re knocking at the door.”
A synthetic, made-to-order living system could produce everything from new drugs to biofuels and greenhouse gas absorbers.
Opponents of the controversial research claim the technology could lead to machines becoming “almost human”.

From GenomeWeb Daily News: HHS Committee Opens Public Comment on Gene Patents

A National Institutes of Health task force has released a draft report on its findings about the effects of gene patenting on medicine, research, and business, and has issued a set of potential policy options for public consideration as part of the report.

The Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Genetics, Health, and Society, which meets this week to discuss a number of other genomics-related issues, will seek public comments until May 15, 2009, on the findings and policy options drafted by its task force.

The SACGHS task force worked with Duke University’s Center for Genome Ethics to draft policy options based on a variety of findings from case studies of certain tests, companies, illnesses, and research areas.

The participation of the smart folks at Duke is a good sign.

2 new publications out of the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health:

From Nature Biotech: A survey of South-North health biotech collaboration

In recent years, biotech companies in North America and Europe have increasingly looked to developing countries to find new partners and develop new collaborations. Even though the growth rates of emerging economies like China and India, as well as several sub-Saharan African countries, have been hampered by the current global recession, over the past five years their economies have grown faster than economies anywhere else in the world. This growth has been reflected by growing indigenous private sectors in health biotech that are also taking active steps to strengthen their innovation capabilities, thereby allowing collaboration to become a two-way street.

And from The Africa Journal: Accelerating African Health Innovation

Effective investments in science, technology, and innovation have the potential to provide long term solutions to Africa’s disease burden. However, to date the Continent has been unable to capture the social and economic potential of science and technology. While Africa is more successful at health research, it is not as successful in commercializing that research into health products aimed at local and regional health problems. To fully harness the potential of indigenous research and development, the barriers that limit commercialization must be better understood and addressed.

From pharmiweb.com: NICE AND GSK GO HEAD-TO-HEAD ON DRUG PRICING AT BUPA HEALTH DEBATE

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the body that approves drugs for the NHS, will go head-to-head with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on the issue of drug pricing at the 2009 Bupa Health Debate on 25 March. The debate pits Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, chairman of NICE against Simon Jose, senior vice president of UK pharmaceuticals at GSK, at a time when conflict between the two organisations escalates over Tyverb, a GSK breast cancer drug. NICE is refusing to approve Tyverb because it is “not a cost-effective use of NHS resources”, despite GSK’s offer to fund the drug for the first 12 weeks of treatment.

This is just one example of ‘life or death’ decisions NICE takes over which drugs to approve for use on the NHS, as it battles to make best use of the limited NHS resources for new medicines. But pharmaceutical companies argue that the prices they charge for new drugs are a fair reflection of their multi-million pound investment in research and development.

Escalating drug prices is not just a UK problem. …

Pricing is a hard ethical problem, partly because there’s so little good scholarly work on the problem.

Australians refused insurance because of poor genes

AUSTRALIANS have been refused insurance protection because of their genetic make-up, researchers have shown in the first study in the world to provide proof of genetic discrimination.

Most cases were found to relate to life insurance. In one instance, a man with a faulty gene linked to a greater risk of breast and prostate cancer was denied income protection and trauma insurance that would have let him claim if he developed other forms of cancer.

The findings have led to renewed calls by experts for policies to ensure the appropriate use of genetic test results by the insurance industry.

From Marc Gunther: Geoengineering: Time to get serious?

Imagine a fleet of 1,500 remote-controlled, wind-powered ships, sailing the world’s oceans, spewing salt water into the air to whiten clouds, so they block more of the sun and cool an overheating planet.

Or think of trillions of tiny mirrors, sent into orbit, to reflect the sun’s rays. Or artificial trees that suck a ton of carbon a day out of the atmosphere. Or iron filings, sprinkled on seas, to rapidly grow phytoplankton, which absorb CO2.

These emergency strategies for curbing global warming aren’t crazy schemes. Well, maybe they are crazy schemes. But serious people say we should start taking them seriously, as a last-ditch option to deal with the threat of catastrophic climate disruptions….

Quite a few of the relevant options, it seems, will make some use of biotechnology.

From the Organic Consumers’ Association:

In this Briefing, we look at how the US’s agricultural reconstruction work in Afghanistan and Iraq not only gives easy entry to US agribusiness and pushes neoliberal policies, something that has always been a primary function of US development assistance, but is also an intrinsic part of the US military campaign in these countries and the surrounding regions.
….
In Afghanistan NEI works with Stine Seed Company, Iowa, and Gateway Seed Company, Illinois, both of which supply it with genetically modified Roundup soya and Roundup-Ready herbicide to be sold on to the farmers. According to NEI, it distributed two tonnes of genetically modified soya seed in Afghanistan in 2005.

I assume they’re saying this is a bad thing.

From AlterNet.org: The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty

Eli Lilly & Company’s rap sheet as a public menace is so long that for Lilly watchers to overcome the “banality-of-Lilly-sleaziness” phenomenon, the drug company must break some type of record measuring egregiousness. Lilly obliged earlier this year, receiving the largest criminal fine ever imposed on a corporation.

If Americans are ever going to revoke the publicly granted charters of reckless, giant corporations — well within our rights — we might want to get the ball rolling with Lilly, whose recent actions appalled even the mainstream media. And with Lilly’s chums, the Bush family, out of power, now might be the right time.

From a few months ago, but a great question: Will biotech change pharma ethics?

Big pharma is continuing to absorb the biotech sector, as the drama over ImClone makes clear.
…
So perhaps it is no coincidence that medical schools are now leading a charge for a higher ethical standard in the industry. Biotechs have long worked under an ethical cloud, one requiring an ethical sensibility.

Can they change things, or will pharma change them instead?

I’ve worried about this for a long time. Biotech faces ethical challenges, but its track record isn’t bad. The pharma industry’s is awful. The promise of biotech is threatened, I think, by the lousy ethics of the industry that’s absorbing it.

This isn’t a biotech story, but relevant to those in the biotech industry who manufacture medical devices:
Wall Street Journal: Political Lobbying Drove FDA Process

The recent approval of a new device to treat knee injuries followed a lobbying campaign that overcame repeated rejections by scientists within the Food and Drug Administration, agency documents show.

The FDA’s internal dissent over Menaflex, which targets the most-common knee injury afflicting everyone from high-school athletes to baby boomers, is straining a government agency that oversees a quarter of the U.S. economy. Some senior FDA staff members complained in documents that the handling of Menaflex, made by ReGen Biologics Inc., shows how political and industry pressure can influence scientific conclusions.