The issue of Conflicts of Interest (COI) was identified as an emerging priority by CIHR's Standing Committee on Ethics (SCE). The SCE believes that the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has a role to play in catalyzing discussion in the health research community on how these conflicts ought to be managed, and leading by example.
It is generally accepted that Conflicts of Interest may arise in the pursuit of research carried by individual researchers. However, they also affect research institutions though there has been much less attention paid to the ethical complexities that research institutions face with respect to their role in supporting research activities. As a result, CIHR hosted in October 2004 an invitational meeting on Institutional Conflicts of Interest (ICOI). The objectives of the meeting were to: 1) identify and clarify key ethical issues regarding potential conflicts of interest in the sponsorship of health research and the dissemination of research results; 2) identify concrete strategies, including immediate steps, for managing various types of institutional conflicts of interest; and 3) identify areas in which more research is needed to fully understand and respond to the ethical complexities involved.
As a follow-up to the invitational meeting, CIHR has taken a number of steps to ensure wide dissemination of the outcomes of the meeting to research institutions and the wider community, and to encourage continued work on issues of ICOI. To that effect, a report and a summary of the workshop are available on the CIHR website; a Request For Applications (RFA) has been launched in the spring of 2005 by CIHR to address priority issues in the area of institutional conflicts of interest in health research; and a breakout session was held at the annual conference of the Canadian Bioethics Society in the fall of 2005 in Halifax to present the invitational meeting recommendations.
Furthermore, a Conference on Conflicts of Interest in Research was held in Toronto on February 22-23, 2007. The objective of the conference was to help research institutions develop their own institutional policy on conflicts of interest, as required in the Tri-Agency (CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC) MOU schedule on Conflicts of Interest (soon to be released) .
