September 1, 2026. Second “Meet the Authors” webinar with Jill A. Fisher who will discuss Women participation in Phase I trials (Tuesday September 1, at 8am US East Coast Time /2pm Central European Time/ /8pm Japan Time). Please register through this link : https://forms.gle/jP4fXoxpDoS9Tjsy7
June 30, 2026 : VOLRETHICS Association Quarterly Update for 2nd quarter of 2026 is released.
June 18, 2026. First “Meet the Authors” Webinar : Too few scientific publications address issues related to healthy volunteers’ involvement in research. To encourage more research in the field, we are starting a series of « Meet the Authors » webinars where authors present and discuss their publication with the VOLRETHICS network. The first webinar, on June 18, 2026, discussed the « over-volunteering » phenomenon (i.e. not respecting exclusion periods between trials), with Dr. Fukase and Prof. Kumagai, the authors of the landmark paper “Over-volunteering in Phase I clinical trials: data from a healthy volunteers’ registry in Japan » : https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/7231. This is the first published evidence on the frequency of over-volunteering, through 20 years of data collection on over 800 000 healthy volunteers in Japan. To view the meeting report please click here.
June, 4, 2026. 1Day Sooner releases the recommendations of its Participant Council on the Global Ethics Charter for the Protection of Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Trials.
1Day Sooner is a nonprofit, member of the VOLRETHICS Association, that advocates for people who participate in high-impact medical studies
Its Participant Council includes 17 healthy research volunteers from 8 countries. In April 2026, the Council’s members discussed the practical implementation of two of the 15 Global Ethics Charter’s articles, namely Articles 3 (representation) and 13 (financial compensation) and issued their recommendations.
The work carried out by1Day Sooner’s Participant Council illustrates how the Global Ethics Charter can be used as a support to discuss how to better protect and empower healthy volunteers through practical recommendations that are adapted to the needs and realities of different stakeholders. It is the first time the Charter is used by an international group of healthy volunteers to strengthen participant-centred research. Please see here, 1Day Sooner’ press release.
April 2026. Ireland’s National Office for Research Ethics Committees has issued an ”Ethics guidance on Phase I clinical trials involving Healthy Volunteers” document that includes some of the recommendations made in the VOLRETHICS Global Ethics Charter for the Protection of Healthy Volunteers in Clinical Trials. This is the first time that the Charter is used by an official body as a reference document to develop its own recommendations.
April 2026 : A three-part limited Science podcast entitled « The Normals » tells the story of healthy human research participants recruited by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) since the 1950s. This podcast series is based on « The Normals. A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments » by Laura Stark, to be released in January 2027. In Episode 3, VOLRETHICS is mentionned during interviews with Jill Fisher, Kaviya Manoharan and Martin Enserink.
March 30, 2026 : VOLRETHICS Association Quarterly Update for 1st quarter of 2026 is released.