Ethical Issues with Clinical Trials in Developing Countries

In recent years, the increasingly global nature of health research and the conduct of clinical trials involving human participants have highlighted a number of new ethical issues. This often happens when researchers or research sponsors from a developed country wish to conduct research in a developing country. The research in question might simply be one way of helping the host country address a public health problem, or it might reflect a research sponsor’s assessment that the foreign location is a more convenient or efficient-or less troublesome-site for conducting a particular clinical trial. In any case, as the pace and scope of international collaborative biomedical research have increased during the past decade, long-standing questions about the ethics of designing, conducting, and following up on clinical trials have reemerged. Some of these issues have begun to take center stage because of the concern that research conducted by scientists from more prosperous countries in poorer nations that are more affected by disease may, at times, be seen as imposing ethically inappropriate burdens on the host country and on those who participate in the research trials.