Introduction:
The Ethics of Participant Funded Trials for Healthy Ageing
As funding for clinical research becomes increasingly competitive, and medicines are less affordable, are there opportunities to develop new funding approaches that allow participants to contribute to the cost of a trial? Charging large sums of money to allow patients access to clinical research is ethically abhorrent, but three recently proposed variations of this basic idea avoid the obvious ethical objections. These novel approaches to participant-funded clinical research could provide an important source of new money for clinical trials, particularly suited to the timely development of treatments to meet the needs of an ageing population. This workshop will explore these potential new mechanisms for funding clinical trials, and assess the ethical issues that may be raised by taking this approach. It will consider the associated benefits, and unintended consequences, including those relating to subsequent commercialisation and disruption to traditional drug discovery pathways, and will consider the requirements to manage and facilitate such funding, including regulatory and oversight requirements. It will bring together multidisciplinary researchers, industry partners, and patient group representation to examine these important questions, leading to an academic publication which will build on previous academic literature in this area.