Abstract
Large-scale genetics cohort studies that link genotypic and phenotypic information hold special promise for clinical medicine, but they demand long-term investment and enduring trust from human research participants. Currently, there are a handful of large-scale studies that aim to succeed where others have failed, seeking to generate significant private-sector investment while preserving long-term interest and trust of studied communities. With project planners looking for new modes of managing such complex collective endeavors, the idea of using a charitable trust structure for genomic biobanks has received increasing scholarly and policy attention. This article clarifies how thorny questions around property rights, the right to withdraw from research, access to materials, and funding might be handled within such a charitable trust structure to help produce a viable participatory framework for genomics.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0 ), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Winickoff, D.E., Neumann, L.B. Towards a social contract for genomics: property and the public in the 'Biotrust' Model. Life Sci Soc Policy 1, 8 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-5354-1-3-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-5354-1-3-8