ethics

Further collaboration between the Institut Pasteur and three national research ethics committees in West Africa

In connection with the AFREENET (Africa Ethics Excellence Network) project, funded by EDCTP, the Ethics Unit and the Health-Ethics-Compliance Department in the Legal Affairs Department are organizing a week of workshops at the Institut Pasteur, from November 18 to 22, 2019, with delegations from the national ethics committees of Guinea, Benin and Côte d'Ivoire.

The participants will work together to explore two main themes:

  1. Regulatory Frameworks & Advocacy (task leader: Anne-Laure Morin): this 2.5-day session aims to strengthen the regulatory framework for research involving human subjects in each of these countries, and also to position the committees so that they are recognized by their governments as proactive leaders if the legal framework needs to be supplemented or consolidated. Advocacy expert Patrice Sanon (Jurisexpress, Burkina Faso) will offer guidance to the committees in implementing an action plan.

  2. Biobanking (task leader: Virginie Pirard): this one-day session will aim to boost the skills of each of the committees in providing ethical and legal supervision for research using human biological samples and personal data. Various governance models will be examined and the question of research support infrastructures will be explored, with a contribution from expert Jeanne-Hélène Di Donato (3cR, France).

The aim of the AFREENET project is to support National Research Ethics Committees in West Africa in their role of assessing and regulating research involving human subjects, human samples and/or personal data. The project is fully in line with the Institut Pasteur Strategic Plan, and also reminds us that historically (from the 1960s onwards), ethics committees – which are multidisciplinary by their very nature – were the first to lay the foundations for dialog between Science and Society, and that the African continent was among the first to lead the way. A research ethics committee was established at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in 1966 and is still very much active today. The AFREENET project is coordinated by Virginie Pirard, Head of the Ethics Unit.

Find out more

For more information about this event, please contact the Ethics Unit: ethics@pasteur.fr

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