Report from the 'Governing Biomodification' (BioGov) End of Project workshop July 2022

The aim of the project “Governing biomodification in the life sciences” (‘BioGOV’) was to assess the regulatory framework for three emerging ‘biomodifying’ technologies: gene editing, induced pluripotent stem cells and 3D bioprinting. Each is an emerging technology with significant scientific, economic and medical potential. The project utilised a combination of legal and regulatory analysis, and empirical social science to understand the formal regulatory frameworks and the incentives, concepts and institutional factors shaping the translation of these technologies from laboratory tools into new potential healthcare products and services. BioGOV was a collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Sussex and York and ran from September 2018 to August 2022. The project was funded by the Leverhulme Trust through project grant RPG2017-330. The BioGOV end of project meeting took place online on 18 July 2022. The aim of the workshop was two-fold: i) to disseminate key findings from the BioGOV project and, ii) to explore new directions for research, especially with regards to the potential for citizen-centric governance of biomodifying technologies. The structure of this report echoes those core aims. Section 2 presents the background to the BioGOV project (2.1), summarises its core research goals (2.2), methods (2.3) and findings (2.4). Section 3 then reviews the end of project workshop itself, covering the purpose and scope of the meeting, reports the content of the two core presentations on the empirical (3.1) and legal/theoretical (3.2) ramifications of the project and the workshop discussions which followed each presentation. Section 4 concludes this report by summarising the range of directions identified for future research on responsible, and citizen-centred governance of technological innovation.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust (UK) under grant number RPG-2017-330