A stimulating international event!
Policy Panel Film available here
See the Sussex news report viewable here
See the full ESRC/ERC report here
See the panel Films
See photos from the day here
Conference Concept:
Knowledge in the life sciences is increasingly influenced by the international contexts in which it is created: it is produced through socio-economic and policy institutions, including regulation, national science policies and education. From an actor perspective, however, it is shaped by what we call bionetworking: the cultivation of relations, the mobilisation of networks, the management of material and intellectual resources, and the negotiation of conventions and standards by scientists and institutions when engaged in science.
International and domestic collaborations in regenerative medicine have increased rapidly over the last decades, including in Asia. Traditionally, we view collaboration as the pooling of resources by partners that complement each other with the aim at producing scientific results. But as part of bionetworks, we find that collaborations include, or are dominated by other aims and realities, such as competition for intellectual property, market gain, and fame. Collaborations are also fraught with power imbalances among different partners, which may be central to their scientific success or failure. For this reason, we find it fruitful to examine the bionetworking, which underlies all life science production, in both contexts of competition and collaboration.
This symposium examines how scientific and non-scientific developments intertwine, how collaboration interlinks with competition, and how established and non-established scientific powers feed and hamper each other in shaping the life sciences.
A policy panel of well-known scientists and policymakers will debate ‘Standard Setting, Regulation and the Authorisation of Stem Cell Therapies’. The scientists, policymakers and science observers of this panel debate the standard setting by which stem cell therapies are regulated and authorised in an international context.
With a general focus on bionetworking in biomedicine, and a particular focus on regenerative medicine, five subpanels will explore three main themes: cell therapy production (infrastructures, platforms, biomaterials), provision (patient recruitment, therapy services, patient care), and policies (governance, policy-making, standard setting).
Keynote Speaker:
Insoo Hyun, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University, USA, and former leader in creation of ISSCR regulation
Policy Panel Speakers
Paulo Bianco, critic of (MSC) therapy providers, University of Rome
Willem Fibbe, Head of Department of Immunotherapy and Blood Transfusion, Leiden University Medical Centre, Netherlands
Hongyun Huang, provider and application of cell therapy, Center of Neurorestoratology, Beijing Rehabilitation Hospital of Capital Medical University, China
Kamthorn Pruksananonda, Associate Professor of OB&GYN, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bankok
Alok Sharma, Director, NeuroGen Brain and Spine Institute, Mumbai
Geeta Shroff, Founder and Medical Director, Nutech Mediworld, New Delhi