News9th September 2025
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) is the only UK organisation with a bioethics horizon scanning and foresight (HS&F) programme, which we use to anticipate scientific developments and health trends that pose fundamental ethical questions to society.
We know through engagement with our UK and international stakeholders that the scans we publish are well regarded and utilised, and that the recent timeframe analysis we have added is considered useful. However, as we focus primarily on UK-based data and insights, our scans so far have been unable to show whether the emerging trends occurring in the UK are shared by – or unique from – other countries. We now want to address this limitation, as advances in biomedical science and health are very seldom held by country borders.
The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is an independent, global, non-profit organisation that promotes excellence in stem cell science and applications to human health. It represents nearly 5,000 scientists, educators, ethicists, and business leaders across 80+ countries, uniting them all with a global vision where stem cell science is encouraged, ethics are prioritised, and discovery improves understanding and advances human health. The ISSCR is embarking upon a review of its organisational priorities, meaning a 10+ year scan of the international stem cell research landscape would be of use.
Taken together, this uniquely positions the NCOB and ISSCR as strategic partners. Our role will be to design and facilitate a bespoke HS workshop that will help the ISSCR in their mapping of potential ethical challenges and policy opportunities within stem cell research. The ISSCR’s role will be to to convene their membership and help us to explore how to reflect international insights in a timeframed bioethical horizon scan.
The pace of discovery in stem cell research continues to accelerate, raising profound opportunities and ethical questions. By undertaking this global horizon scan, we aim to anticipate the trends that will shape science and society over the next decade. These insights will strengthen the ISSCR Guidelines and inform our public policy priorities to ensure responsible advancement of the field.”
Keith Alm, CEO, ISSCR
We will now begin working with ISSCR to design a workshop for their Board members and invited guests, taking place in Boston in December. We will then use insights from the workshop in a HS survey which will go to all ISSCR members.
Alongside this, we will convene an internationally representative group of Futures experts to review our current UK-focused timeframe matrix, exploring how it could be applied using insights from the ISSCR’s represented countries.
Our ambition, in spring 2026, is to publish an internationally informed 10+ year scan, which focuses on stem cell research and has been timeframed for ethical implications. We will then take learnings from this partnership project into future NCOB HS publications, presenting our insights in a global context where possible and appropriate.
The current pace of global scientific change and the potential this has for shifting societal norms within and across nations means to do good policy work in the UK, we need to be cognisant of global drivers, systems and values. This is why we are exploring ways to enrich our horizon scan methodology to become more internationally informed and enhancing its presentation so that users of our data can see where there is topic overlap and divergence between countries.
I am excited about this partnership with the ISSCR as it is our first step towards exploring what is possible. I look forward to seeing what we learn together.”
Danielle Hamm, Director, Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Related projects
-
Joint project