Category: Biotech and Bioinformatics

Posted on

Data Protetcion, MTA, Human Samples and Identity Backtracing

To comply with privacy and data-protection regulations, Material Transfer Agreements for human samples often state that the samples are either anonymous (meaning: the donor institution doesn’t know at all the ID of the patient) or anonymized (the donor institution only knows and keeps secret the patient ID.) But this compliance approach won’t work anymore, since the probability of backtracing the ID of patient accessing third parties provided information is not only a proof-of-concept but an “actual reality.”

Amending the MTA to handle this issue is far more complicated than ask the lawyers to just re-phrase their lingo, because what is actually needed is a thorough analysis of the human sample collection process back to the first ring of the donor chain.

The sooner the biobank community will address this issue, the better for the research, the pharma industry and – first of all – the patient himself.

Posted on

The “Specialist” Lawyer… Whatever It Means

An upcoming regulation – still in draft – will regulate the possibility for an Italian lawyer to call himself “specialist” of something. This “specialist patch” will be obtained by either attending seminars and courses or by showing evidence of practicing in a specific field (BTW, in the mandatory list of field of practice, there are no reference to high-tech, pharma and telco topics.)

I wonder which company has ever chosen a lawyer just because of the patches he stuck on his gown.

Posted on

The Danger of the New Crusaders and the Risk for the Medical Research

Repubblica.it, an Italian online newspaper, accounts for the cancellation of a fund-raising initiative to collect money for the research on rare disease. The cancellation has been motivated by the fear of riots provoked by animalist activists who object living animals to be used in medical research. This form of terrorism is a dangerous growing trend in Italy, and one of the reasons for this growing is that extreme animalism is not perceived as bad as its “political” sibling (thank to the support given by teen-agers oriented TV channels, politicians and artists.) I don’t see how the opinion of (former)models, self-professed experts with no impact-factor or citation-index or bloggers-on-a-mission should prevail over the facts stated by the major Italian research institution.

Anyway the consequence is that police authorities and the government aren’t taking seriously this issue letting activists to continue threatening the medical and biotech research in Italy. Of course I don’t claim that “every animalist is a terrorist” and I don’t want to enter into the semantics of both words. What I do not find fair is the justification for the use of violence in the name of an idea: the field of history is crossed by enormous rivers of blood because somebody bleieved to be absolutely right, thus taking the burden to “convert” those who disagreed.

As often happens in Italy, this is the result of the a confusion between “ethics” (that is a personal matter) and “law” (that is – or is supposed to be – a tool for balancing contradictory interests.) This confusion is likely to badly affects the feasibility of the scientific research in Italy. I still haven’t collected enough information about how big a disincentive this animalist threat is for the health companies who want to invest in Italy, but the very first hints don’t let imagine a bright future.

Posted on

How Linkedin Helped to Fight a Possible Scam

Among the usual daily flow of e-mails that submerges me, today I’ve spotted a request for contact coming from a North-European research firm active in the healthcare sector. Its CFO asked for information about a possible breach of contract litigation.

I didn’t have any reason to think of this e-mail as a scam, but there was “something” definitely odd in the message. So I checked both the person and the company name on the Internet and they were real. Still, I wasn’t convinced and decided to have a look at the message header: again, I got contradictory results. The mail server used to send the message was in a remote part of the US, belonging to a local ISP with no apparent connection with both Europe and the Healthcare industry the message was (apparently) coming from.

This couldn’t be a coincidence so I’ve searched the Linkedin profile of the manager that allegedly sent me the message and dropped him an in-mail (so to be sure about his identity and affiliation) and… gotcha! He replied confirming that it wasn’t him the sender of the message.

To put it short, it was a scam and being on Linkedin helped both me to avoid a fraud and this company to discover that it is targeted by an identity theft.