Time: 12 - 1 P.M. (NST)
Location: https://mun.webex.com/meet/pginternalmedicine

Title: What Do Drug Companies Owe Patients?
Presented by Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD

Abstract:
Pharmaceutical companies on average invest $1.3B to develop a new drug. But they aren’t the only entities that invest time, capital and welfare in this arduous effort. Patients do as well, when they volunteer for clinical trials. In this talk, I will argue that drug development depends on a large volume of sustained volunteer labor on the part of patients who participate in trials (and the caregivers who support their participation). I will further argue that, for the most part, this labor is uncompensated. Uncompensated, this volunteer labor engenders a set of moral obligations. Namely, societies (and the companies pursuing this research) have obligations to act as trustees of this gift of volunteer labor. I will close by describing how various policies around drug regulation and pricing can help steward patients’ subsidy of drug development.

Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD, is James McGill Professor of Biomedical Ethics at McGill University, and directs the Biomedical Ethics Unit as well as his own research group, STREAM (Studies in Translation, Ethics and Medicine). Kimmelman’s research centers on ethical, policy, and scientific dimensions of clinical development. Kimmelman received the Maud Menten New Investigator Prize (2006), a CIHR New Investigator Award (2008), a Humboldt Bessel Award (2014), and was elected a Hastings Center Fellow (2018). He has sat on various advisory bodies within the U.S. NHLBI and NIAID, served for four tours of duty on U.S. National Academies of Medicine committees, and chaired the International Society of Stem Cell Research Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation revision task force 2015-16. His research has been covered in major media outlets, including NPR’s All Things Considered, STATNews, and Nature. Kimmelman is deputy editor at Clinical Trials, and associate editor at Cell Med.