Challenges to Demonstrated Consent in Biobanking: Technical, Ethical, and Regulatory Considerations

Challenges to Demonstrated Consent in Biobanking: Technical, Ethical, and Regulatory Considerations
Open Peer Commentaries
Jasmine E. McNealy, Megan Doerr
American Journal of Bioethics, 7 April 2025
Excerpt
We read with interest Barnes and colleagues’ recent article, “Enabling Demonstrated Consent for Biobanking with Blockchain and Generative AI” (Barnes et  al. 2025). We appreciate their efforts to succinctly ground their proposal within consent scholarship and their distillation of the ethical challenges of informed consent for repository contexts. Like many, we are vocal advocates for improving the informed consent process, especially within repository enabled research (Doerr et  al. 2021). We also strongly support the creative use of technology to mitigate consent’s shortcomings (Moore et  al. 2017; Kraft and Doerr 2018). However, we are concerned that Barnes et  al.’s proposal faces several critical technical challenges to implementation, does not account for key features of repository enabled research, and adds novel regulatory concerns to the mix…