Research areas

Research focus
 

•     Health and (bio)medical law
   
•     Data protection and data security law as special administrative law
   
•     Legal framework and modalities of European and international data exchange
   
•     Law of life sciences from the perspective of fundamental and human rights law
   
•     Comparative law in the field of data protection law, medical law and the law of life sciences

The main objective of the research group is to analyze the legal framework of new medical technologies, research and treatment methods. In accordance with national, European and international normative bases, we develop standards in this regard in order to contribute to the further development of the legal framework. The legal standard in turn takes into account the interactions of new technologies in both development and application. The focus of analyses in the area of medical research and care is on addressing legal issues relating to genomics, stem cell research and therapies, cancer medicine, genome editing, biobanking and pediatrics.

To achieve this goal, our group conducts research in the areas of privacy law, medical law, and health law, with a strong focus on the international perspective and in a comparative and interdisciplinary manner. In particular, in the context of data protection, we analyze regulatory models and explore the legal requirements for data sharing in different models. Research projects are conducted in close collaboration with other faculties and in cooperation with non-university
 

Research Projects (Selection)

- Individualising & democratizing cancer patient care via Artificial Intelligence (VolkswagenStiftung)
Project description:
A key promise of personalized medicine is that once realised, all citizens - irrespective of whether they are in cities or in rural areas - will be able to equally benefit from state-of-the-art individualized health care. The project will employ a transdisciplinary approach driven by AI to precision medicine for prostate cancer in a regionally oriented model project targeting 8% of the German population, which in the future may be expanded inter-regionally or internationally. This will build on machine learning methods, to guide targeted treatment decisions based on deep learning classifiers that integrate longitudinally observed clinical measurements with multi-omic data. Altogether, the project represents a step towards the sharing of human, physical, and intellectual resources in healthcare consistent with social values and individuals' reasonable expectations and the concepts of fairness, inclusivity and equality. It will additionally foster the further development of AI as a technological framework for public health governance.

- Datenschutzrechtliches Reallabor für eine Datentreuhand in der Netzwerkmedizin – TrustDNA (BMBF)
Project description:
The aim of the project is to contribute to the rule-based availability of data from network medicine for research-based companies and public research institutions. The focus is on the clarification of the data protection legal design of various data trust models. The processes are to be designed in such a way that patients can be involved in research projects as data providers in an active role. In addition, the connection to national and European initiatives is strived for.