This talk is based on the Digital Clinical Trials and Private Equity Firms book chapter in a forthcoming volume “Health Law as Private Law,” edited by the Harvard Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The essay intervenes in scholarly discussions about the decentralization of clinical trials, asking whether the rapidly growing interest of private equity firms in the medical research space is conducive to the goal of making scientific evidence and safe and effective medicine widely accessible. The essay examines the purpose of clinical trial decentralization and the acute use of technology to recruit and interact with trial participants in remote sites and identifies the business incentives of private equity firms in medical research. As such, the essay identifies the social and economic tensions between the maximization of profits and the maximization of safety around the production of scientific evidence, risking safe and effective medicines from reaching the market. The essay concludes that private equity firms digitizing clinical trials might aggravate the problems of data opacity of medical research in the U.S., thereby undermining the safety, efficacy—and accessibility—of drugs.
Speaker
Dr. Ximena Benavides, J.S.D., LL.M., LL.B.
Lecturer and Postdoctoral Associate, Ethics, Politics, and Economics Program, Yale University
Information Society Project Postdoctoral Resident Fellow, Yale Law School
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