Accelerated Pathways and Evidentiary Thresholds: Global Health R&D in the Age of Emergency
This presentation interrogates emerging paradigm of global health: emergency R&D. Through the notion of the ‘evidentiary threshold’, Ann explores how the humanitarian imperatives of disease control and regulatory apprehensions of risk play out playing the accelerated development, testing and licensure of medical interventions.
Using case studies from the Ebola and Zika outbreaks, Ann investigates the suite of issues that have come to characterise emergency R&D, from the commitment to data sharing, to access and testing of samples. Critical reflection on the successes and failures in rapidly bringing fit-for-purpose products to the market provides critical insight into the forms of exceptionalism attendant to emergency R&D, and the potential blindspots this agenda might introduce into the field of global health innovation.
About the speaker
Dr Ann Kelly is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Global Health and Deputy Director of the MSc in Global Health & Social Justice programme at King’s College London. An anthropologist by training (Cambridge University, 2007), Ann’s ethnographic research has often been intertwined with public health interventions and disease control programmes, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Her work has received support from a wide range of funders, including the Wellcome Trust, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. Ann has addressed a number of substantive topics, from mosquito control programmes in urban and rural contexts to emergency clinical trials during the recent West African Ebola outbreak.
In addition to working with a range of entomologists, biologists, parasitologists, public health experts and geneticists, she is currently working with a group of sustainable architects, urban designers and landscape artists in an effort to ‘hack’ fundamental paradoxes of mosquito rearing, collection and release.
This session will be live-streamed – accessible to internal audience only
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