Lucassen group - CELS

The Clinical Ethics, Law and Society (CELS) Research Group brings together researchers from different disciplines to examine how advances in research and technology are changing the way we predict, prevent, diagnose and treat disease or illness. Our work sits alongside highly technical genomics and data science teams, asking what it takes to make these advances work in real world settings and in people’s lives.

We see interdisciplinarity as essential: only by bringing scientists into sustained conversation and collaboration with ethicists, social scientists, clinicians and policy makers can we translate exciting research developments into workable, fair and trusted forms of health care for patients and publics.

We are interested in how advances in technology and large‑scale data use, reshape responsibilities for clinicians, policy makers and health systems, and in what we can learn from how these changes are experienced by patients, family members and wider publics.

Key strands of our research include:

• Ethical preparedness - understanding how clinicians, services and policymakers can anticipate and respond to the ethical challenges of rapidly evolving technologies. The ethical preparedness in genomic medicine project [EPPiGen] was a Wellcome collaborative grant (2017-2025) that explored this concept in the context of large-scale projects such as the 100,000 genomes project and other genomic cohorts.
• Familial communication - exploring how respect for consent and confidentiality in one person is balanced with the need, sometimes, to alert their relatives to heritable risk. We ask when, how, and by whom such communication should happen, what new duties are created as well as how these might be implemented in practice.
• Genomic care - shifting attention from genomics as a technological or informational enterprise towards the relational, ethical and practical work through which genomic knowledge becomes meaningful and actionable. We explore how care is organised, sustained and experienced across clinical practice, family life and health systems.
• Inequality, inclusion and data - examining how efforts to diversify genomic data and widen access to personalised medicine interact with existing social and structural inequalities.
• Making and communicating results - analysing how genomic “results” are constructed from complex data, and how uncertainty can be incorporated in discourses of blueprints and certainty
• Incidental findings - investigating how to navigate variants that may confer risks of other diseases but are discovered during testing for other conditions
• Reshaping healthcare - exploring how healthcare is reorganised across settings, including how online health advice and direct to consumer testing reshapes clinical encounters responsibilities and expectations
• Environmental sustainability - exploring the environmental footprint of personalised medicine and how care ethics can support more sustainable research and clinical practice.

We turn these insights into policy, clinical and bioethical recommendations, while contributing to academic debate. Examples include recent positions on the ethics advisory committee of Genomics England and the Joint Committee on Genomics in Medicine, and current roles on the UK National Screening Committee, the British Society for Genetic Medicine Ethics and Policy Committee and the Genethics Forum.

We work closely with Centre for Personalised Medicine, providing a core research strand on the ethical, social and legal dimensions of efforts to personalise medicine and care

We welcome new collaborations, from students, colleagues or other interested parties.