Regenerative Medicine and the Bioethics of Globalization, Justice and Hegemony

Ubaka Ogbogu
is a Professor and the Katz Chair in Health Law and Science Policy in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta. He is the Chair of the University of Alberta’s Research Ethics Board 2 and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Dr. Ogbogu is a recipient of the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations Distinguished Academic Early Career Award. He holds a doctorate in law from the University of Toronto, a Master of Laws degree from the University of Alberta, and undergraduate degrees in law from the University of Benin, Nigeria, and the Nigerian Law School.

Dr. Ogbogu's scholarly work focuses broadly on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of novel and emerging biotechnologies and related research. His recent work engages with the global governance of regenerative medicine, highlighting issues of epistemic injustice, structural inequities, and the underrepresentation of low- and middle-income country perspectives in bioethics and innovation policy. Through this work, he examines how context-sensitive, collaborative, and pluralistic approaches to ethics can address disparities in the development and distribution of cutting-edge health technologies.



Dr. Ogbogu has served on several boards and councils with a direct focus on regenerative medicine governance and policy, including the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Somatic Gene and Engineered Cell Therapies, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Stem Cell Oversight Committee, and the International Society for Stem Cell Research Task Force on Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation.



 



Donrich Thaldar
is a full Professor of Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, where he chairs the Health Law & Ethics Research Interest Group. He is currently principal investigator of an NIH-funded project that investigates the legal aspects of data science in health innovation in Africa. Professor Thaldar also has a private law practice, where he specializes in strategic litigation in reproductive law (reprolaw). Before starting his academic career in 2017, he practiced as an advocate at the Pretoria Bar. He served as legal counsel or as amicus curiae in several landmark cases in the field of reprolaw in South Africa. Some highlights are: The first case that considered the concept of ‘designer children’ (2016); the first case of posthumous conception (2018); the first case of gamete withdrawal from a comatose person (2020); and the first case about the enforceability of a sperm donor agreement (2021); and a successful legal challenge to the constitutionality of the statutory prohibition on non-medical preimplantation sex selection (2022).

Nishakanthi Gopalan
is a Senior Lecturer at the Medical Humanities and Ethics Unit (MedHEU), Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya (UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Programme Coordinator for the Master of Health Research Ethics (MOHRE), the first postgraduate programme in health research ethics in Southeast Asia. MOHRE was developed in collaboration with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University through a Fogarty International Center bioethics training grant, MOHRE focuses on building regional capacity in culturally attuned health research ethics. Dr. Gopalan holds a PhD in research ethics, and her scholarship centres on bioethics, research ethics, and the governance of emerging technologies, with particular emphasis on low- and middle-income country contexts.

She serves on the Universiti Malaya Research Ethics Committee (UMREC) and the Universiti Malaya Medical Centre–Medical Research Ethics Committee (UMMC-MREC), and is an editorial board member of the Asian Bioethics Review. Her research and publications explore the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies, including stem cell research, genetic testing, artificial intelligence in healthcare, and synthetic biology.