Webinar: How Race and Social Inequities Influence Healthy People’s Paid Participation in FDA-Required Clinical Trials – Dec 7

Posted by University of Pennsylvania on November 23, 2021

This event is part of the 2021-2022 Lecture Series on Race and Regulation, organized by the Penn Program on Regulation and co-sponsored by the Penn Law Office of Equity and Inclusion. Professor Jill Fisher, of the Center for Bioethics at UNC-Chapel Hill, is the speaker.

This lecture will be held over Zoom and is free and open to the public. We welcome anyone with an interest in learning more about race and regulation, including students from across Penn or at other colleges and universities. Please feel free to share word of this event with others who may be interested.

Professor Fisher’s research explores how social inequities are produced or exploited by commercialized medicine in the United States, with a primary focus on how clinical trials are conducted.

Phase I clinical trials are required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to test the safety and tolerability of new pharmaceuticals. These trials typically require participants to be confined—and often literally locked in—to residential research facilities for some portion of the clinical trial and enroll healthy people as paid research participants. Drawing on ethnographic research at 6 clinics across the US, this talk illustrates how healthy volunteers’ decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by larger social contexts of economic insecurity and racial discrimination that make clinical trial participation an attractive financial opportunity. Indeed, Phase I clinical trials include an overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities who often enroll serially in these studies to stay financially afloat or try to get ahead.

Date and Time: December 6, 2021, 5:00-6:00 PM

Register.