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The Ethox Centre
The Ethox Centre is dedicated to enhancing patient care by improving ethical understanding and ethical standards. From the beginning the Ethox Centre has combined multidisciplinary research, education, and ethics support to health services and medical researchers. Each of these activities supports the others and there is no clear dividing line between them.
The Ethox Centre brings together a multidisciplinary research group of clinicians, anthropologists, lawyers, philosophers and sociologists. Ethox collaborates closely with researchers in the University of Oxford, other universities and with the health services. Within the University of Oxford, there is particularly close collaboration with public health, primary care, medical sciences, and a wide range of clinicians, epidemiologists, philosophers, social scientists and lawyers.
Featured Project: Malariagen
Malaria is one of humankind’s most persistent and deadly foes, causing debilitating illness in approximately half a billion people each year. Successful vaccine development relies on understanding the genetic and immunological responses determining the severity of an individual patient’s malaria, and ultimately whether they live or die. The Malaria Genomic Epidemiology Network (MalariaGEN), in which the Ethox Centre leads the ethics programme, draws on the expertise of scientists from more than 20 countries and, funded by the Gates Grand Challenge Scheme and the Wellcome Trust, aims to integrate the latest genomic and epidemiological knowledge and technology in the attempt to better understand childhood malaria. The cutting edge and rapidly evolving field of genomic epidemiology, particularly when carried out collaboratively between developing and developed countries, raises important ethical and social issues. These include: the development of appropriate processes of consent and community consultation (in a variety of different countries and locations within countries); addressing questions of benefit-sharing, ownership and publication in international collaborative research; and, the development of models for sharing good practice across multiple sites. The Ethox Centre’s leadership of the MalariaGEN ethics programme is a unique venture requiring the development of best ethical practices in situ as part of a world-leading global genomics project. (MalariaGEN Project website)
News and Events
30th June 2008
Workshop: The Genethics Club
A national ethics forum for anyone working in clinical genetics or NHS Laboratories
Lorimer Room, Old College, Edinburgh
For more information contact Michael.parker@ethox.ox.ac.uk
Conference: Open Access and Data Sharing in Genomics
2008 PFGS Regional Seminar
St Anne's College, Oxford
Conference: Governing Biobanks - What are the Challenges?
Governing Genetics Databases Project
St Anne's College, Oxford
Registration and other details: http://ggd.org.uk
