Alessandro Blasimme is a postdoctoral researcher in the Health Ethics and Policy Lab at the Department of Public Health of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on innovation in biomedicine and on its ethical, regulatory and political consequences. He is particularly interested in the evolution of evidentiary standards of risk assessment and clinical validation with respect to highly promissory instances of biomedical innovation, such as regenerative medicine and personalized medicine.

Alessandro was a Fulbright–Schuman Visiting Research Fellow at the Harvard STS Program in Spring 2014. During his stay, he conducted comparative research on the regulatory controversies surrounding the offer of unproven stem cell therapies in the US and in Europe. Alessandro held a previous postdoctoral appointment at INSERM (French Institute of Health and Medical Research).

He received interdisciplinary training in bioethics, STS and molecular biology in his Ph.D. Program on “Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences (FOLSATEC)”  at the University of Milan (European School of Molecular Medicine). Working under the supervision of Giuseppe Testa, in his doctoral dissertation he explored the governance of regenerative medicine, reconstructing the ordering tools that are deployed to tame the novelty of this therapeutic approach. This work highlighted the emergence of divergent models of clinical validation based on contrasting epistemic, ethical and regulatory assumptions. Based on these findings he went on to further research projects exploring the translational imaginaries of current biomedicine and their implications for patients, public health and the polity. He received both his undergraduate degree in Philosophy and his M.Phil in Bioethics from the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.

Selected Publications

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