Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Despite the need to collaborate in biomedical research involving humans, the policies and procedures for reviewing the ethics of such proposed research remains unchanged. Research ethics reviews have, however, increasingly been known to delay collaborative health research unnecessarily, especially when studies are conducted at more than one institutional site. This research explores how an emerging network software, blockchain, can inspire new ways to improve the efficiency and quality of research ethics review, particularly for collaborative biomedical research in genetics and genomics. Blockchain is a networking and connectivity platform that brings stakeholders together online. Information is shared and exchanged between stakeholders, and virtually recorded as a "block." When new information or exchanges occur, an additional "block" is added to the growing "chain" of blocks. This chain is continuously updated and made available to stakeholders on the shared network. While originally invented for online buying and selling, this proposed research investigates the ethical and legal considerations of modeling a new system of research ethics review based on the blockchain concept. Our proposal is that policy makers involved in overseeing the ethics of scientific research can improve the quality and timeliness of ethics reviews, shortening the time between discovery and better healthcare. This theoretical work is timely, as the expansion of blockchain applications to areas beyond finance are concurrent with recent policy reforms to research ethics review in Canada, the United States, Australia and other countries worldwide.