Harmonizing ethics review for international research

Genomic research holds great potential to advance human health and medicine. But for the millions of data points now being collected through large-scale sequencing efforts to be truly valuable, they must be analyzed in aggregate and shared across institutions and jurisdictions. This raises many challenges, including navigation of complex ethics-approval processes at multiple sites and in multiple jurisdictions. Genomic research holds great potential to advance human health and medicine. But for the millions of data points now being collected through large-scale sequencing efforts to be truly valuable, they must be analyzed in aggregate and shared across institutions and jurisdictions. This raises many challenges, including navigation of complex ethics-approval processes at multiple sites and in multiple jurisdictions. In a Policy Forum article published this week in the journal Science , members of the Ethics Review Equivalency (ERE) Task Team of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Regulatory and Ethics Working Group discuss this challenge and ways to address it, particularly through ad hoc models for achieving ethics review "mutual recognition" around the globe.