Science Summit at United Nations General Assembly 77 (UNGA77)

The session will consider how regulations for data protection influence cooperation in medical science and health research and as such affect the achievement of the SDGs.
Regulations in general are vital for diagnostics to ensure good quality standards in health care while data protection regulations aim at giving control to individuals over their personal data while ensuring the free flow of this personal data between member states in the case of Europe by attempting to unify regulations and ultimately to simplify the regulatory environment for international business.
Advances in medical healthcare, to which data subjects who provide their data can avail, can only occur through advances in scientific research and the amalgamation of personal health data. The ability to access masses of health data through global collaboration is paramount to create new diagnostic tools. These tools can help address global health care shorts falls and identify more appropriate treatment for patients.
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in particular, as with any substantive regulatory reform, has had unintended consequences, most notably regarding joint research enterprises, even within the direct scope of Europe, a relatively homogenous region, due to the significant differences in how people approach to privacy. This is compounded by the extraterritorial scope of this regulation and beyond the European GDPR that there are other regions and countries with other regulations, so it is vital to unify these to the SDG on health.
There is a societal benefit in reusing data for appropriate purposes and subject to appropriate safeguard yet fragmentation continues to exist that prevents research collaboration as there is no overarching jurisdiction to govern international collaborations.
The session will consider these issues and speakers will share their own expertise to develop potential mechanisms and recommendations for collaboration