WS 04 - Changes in Health Research during and after the COVID-19 Era

As an unprecedented global health emergency, COVID-19 has also caused substantial change in the research process: health research fighting COVID-19 is faster, more open, and more collaborative than usual. It has both profited from and further accelerated pre-existing practices like preprint publishing and data sharing, and has expedited ethics-review and marketing approval. These changes elicit wide discussions, and have been both hailed and criticized. However, most controversies regarding openness, secondary-use of routine health data, translational success, re-purposing, and regulatory frameworks were apparent already before the pandemic, providing a backdrop to these discussions.
Other COVID-19 related issues are relatively new such as the allocation of scarce research resources and the negative impact on non-COVID-19 research. The rapid changes of current biomedical research thus go beyond the quality and ethics of COVID-19 research specifically, and lead to questions on future developments of research as a whole: What can we learn from these changes? Will they be lasting? Why should global research on other deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, cancer, or dementia be less open and less collaborative? And how are we to shape these changes to advance the global health research system?
The speakers are all at the forefront of changes precipitated by COVID-19 and represent different steps of the research process, from assessment and approval through conduct and publishing to the ultimate translation of research findings. They will contribute their views on the pandemic’s long-term impacts: whether health research will and should change, and if so, how.