Time to promote medical innovation through legislation

We are delighted to hear the Medical Innovation Bill is passing through the House of Lords ¹ in the United Kingdom. This is a brand new approach to tackling human diseases through the medical legislation pathway.

As innovation is such a critical driver in medical research and is hard to avoid in medical practice, ² a new legislation is therefore necessary to encourage it. This will not only benefit clinicians and scientists, but most importantly, will lead to improved patient experience.

The determination of medical negligence in our present law is influenced by evidence-based medicine, ³ so that services provided by health professionals are based on current clinical guidelines. However, as the personalized medicine era is approaching, guidelines for the general population may not be the best choice for a certain patient. In this situation, a novel ‘innovative’ treatment may be warranted for such an individual. If the fear of litigation under this circumstance overcomes the requirement of innovation, neither the doctor nor the patient would benefit from it. Indeed, primum non nocere is our first priority, nonetheless, the so-called ‘defensive medicine’ is a dangerous struck between therapeutic innovation and conservatism. ¹ Especially in those countries or areas where the medical legislation is under-developed such as in China, doctors usually choose the conservative treatment to avoid any potential litigation.

The Bill gives an extraordinary solution to promote medical innovation, and we hope this could lead to a significant contribution leading to worldwide legislation focusing on medical innovation in the future.