Dr. Sugarman’s research focuses on the ethical issues associated with emerging medical technologies and clinical research. For instance, his work helped establish practices for informed consent in umbilical cord banking for use in transplantation. This involved conducting empirical research…
more regarding the timing and content of the consent process as well as evaluating the process that had been implemented for a major public cord blood bank. After completing a national interview study with 1,882 outpatients for the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments that demonstrated the incredible trust among patients in the research enterprise as well as the critical importance of terms used to describe research to the informed consent process, Dr. Sugarman has done extensive empirical research on informed consent for clinical research. He has developed unique methods of evaluating the quality of consent in the context of actual clinical trials and is completing a nationwide site randomized trial testing a means of improving consent. Building on these methods, he received funding to examine the effects of disclosures of financial conflicts of interest in research. In the international research arena, Dr. Sugarman conducted a project for the National Bioethics Advisory Committee demonstrating some of the unintended deleterious implications of the US regulatory approach to international collaborative research that might easily be rectified. He also prepared an ethics guidance document for the HIV Prevention Trials Network that is helping researchers navigate among multiple and sometimes conflicting approaches to ethics in their work.
less