The GFBR 2023 topic is 'Ethics of health research priority setting'

Welcome to the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR)! We are very pleased to have participants from 43 countries (see map of participants’ countries below) and a range of disciplines. Thank you all for your active participation at the Forum and thank you to the Planning Committee and the GFBR funders for all their support. We very much hope the meeting will be a positive experience for us all. You can download the agenda here

About GFBR

The Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) seeks to bring researchers, research policy makers and ethicists, among others together to share experiences and promote collaboration around research ethics. The Forum will be built around case study presentations to ensure that discussion of the ethical issues remain grounded in the practical realities of how research is conducted and prioritised, particularly in low resource settings. Compared to traditional meetings, GFBR is unique in that it is limited in size and built around small group discussions of case studies that are submitted by participants. The Forum prioritises the participation of colleagues from low- and middle- income countries (LMICs), encourages networking and mentoring, and creates a venue for open and inclusive discussions.

About the meeting topic

Health research is a vital component of efforts to improve health worldwide. But the available resources and existing research infrastructure are unable to answer all important research questions in a timely manner. Since which research is conducted affects which populations ultimately benefit from the knowledge generated by the research, the question of how to allocate limited health research resources is an ethical question, not just a technical one.

At present, many governmental and non-profit funders still treat the allocation of much of their research funding as a primarily technical question. For example, untargeted grant funding is largely allocated on the basis of the quality of the science, not on the basis of disease burden or whether it addresses the outcomes patients care about. Meanwhile, existing market incentives mean that for-profit funders mostly aim to develop drugs and devices for wealthier patient populations. When funders do explicitly set priorities for which health problems or types of research they will fund, the methods used for setting those priorities are often opaque. Nor are funders the only parties who affect what research gets carried out. Individual researchers, university officials, advocacy organizations, policy-makers, and many others make decisions about research priorities, even when they do not label themselves as engaged in “priority setting.” The lack of coordination among all these actors makes it likely that resources are globally misallocated and exacerbates the problem of wasteful research. Overall, it is unlikely that research priorities are currently being set in an ethically optimal way.

The importance of research priority setting became especially salient during the COVID-19 pandemic, but, as a global issue, it pre-dates and post-dates the pandemic. The perpetual scarcity of resources for research requires ongoing, difficult decisions about what should be prioritized, who should benefit from research outputs, and who gets to decide these matters. By promoting a global discussion on the ethics of research priority setting, the GFBR aims to move the debate beyond identifying injustices and move towards solutions that are ethically informed, sensitive to context and pay attention to the real-life constraints the different actors involved in research face.

Please read the background paper for full details on the meeting topic.