Empower: Access to Medicine Parliamentary Summit
A panel of academic, political, pharmaceutical and patient experts came together this week (Mon 15th) to start the consultation process for the Halpin Protocol, a legislative blueprint designed to enable patients with life threatening conditions to have more influence on drug development and trials.
Campaign founder Les Halpin is calling for a relaxation of regulations governing the way drugs for people with serious and life threatening conditions are developed and prescribed to speed up innovation and access in this field. The protocol will allow patients to make their own informed choices about the risks of participation in Clinical Trials or taking drugs and therapies originally intended for other conditions.
It is the latest stage of the campaign Empower: Access to Medicine which was founded to put the patient voice at the centre of discussions about the law and ethics around drug development for life threatening conditions where there is insufficient treatment.
The consultation was launched at a Parliamentary debate, chaired by Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP and attended by the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry, the Bioscience Industry Association, the Association of Medical Research Charities, Professor Sir Peter Lachmann, Government Life Sciences adviser George Freeman MP and Shadow Health Minister Jamie Reed MP, amongst others.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown closed the event by asking panel members to work with him and the campaign to help make the Halpin Protocol a reality. He encouraged all the stakeholders to feed in their comments on the Protocol and to help shape its course into the legislative process.
Steve Bates, CEO at UK Bioindustry Association, has written a comment piece after his attendance of the Summit on Monday. http://goo.gl/tpoY5
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