The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Agenda is likely to be the most ambitious activity of our generation towards worldwide justice and equality. Goal No. 3, “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” requires collaboration of all stakeholders, private and public. The pharmaceutical industry and its contribution towards the health and well-being of people around the world can and should play an active role in this process. The symposium of four papers and an editorial is out now from the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.

Working Together to Make the World a Healthier Place – Desiderata for the Pharmaceutical Industry (Klaus Leisinger and Kate Chatfield) links pharmaceutical research to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Agenda, and the newly emerging concept of responsible research and innovation.

In Continued Access to Investigational Medicinal Products for Clinical Trial Participants—An Industry Approach, Ariella Kelman, Anna Kang and Brian Crawford describe an industry approach to a long-standing and complex problem in equitable research relationships: post-trial obligations.

Healthy Volunteers for Clinical Trials in Resource-Poor Settings: National Registries Can Address Ethical and Safety Concerns, (Francois Bompart) goes back to an initiative by the Sanofi Bioethics Committee in collaboration with the TRUST project. To protect healthy volunteers from harm, the author advocates for the setting up of national healthy volunteer registries as already established in France and the UK.

A guest publication from the COMPASS project, Involving Patients in Research? Responsible Research and Innovation in Small- and Medium-Sized European Health Care Enterprises by Kalypso Iordanou analyses the reluctance of small enterprises involved in health research to undertake research involving patients.