PhD Conferral Mr. Lloyd Akrong, MSc.

Keywords: Clinical trials, LMICs, Trial participants, Africa, Biomedical research, ethical frameworks

“Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in Scientific Research: participant perspectives, and the contextualization of clinical trial conduct and involvement in sub-Saharan African settings”

Clinical trials with human subjects have generated vast amounts of useful knowledge. However, it is important to know that trials are never risk-free. There is always a chance that something could go wrong. With the expansion of biomedical research activities to lower-resourced countries, like those found in sub-Saharan Africa, a number of ethical and regulatory concerns are raised: Does research participation make people more or less vulnerable?  What mechanisms are in place to protect ones safety? Are the risks proportionate to the benefits? My work seeks to gain insight into these questions using the collected perspectives of trial participants from Ghana and Tanzania and to analyse how they can be used to contribute to the development of more robust future research governance frameworks.