Asst Prof Nicholas Francis Grigoropoulos

Senior Consultant, Department of Haematology
Singapore General Hospital

Assistant Professor
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School

Asst Prof Nicholas Francis Grigoropoulos’s passion is for treating and investigating blood disorders and blood cancers in particular. He combines his clinical expertise with an intensive laboratory research interest in order to maximise the benefits of patients being treated at the SingHealth-Duke Blood Cancer Centre. Asst Prof Grigoropoulos obtained his medical degree from University College London in 2001, and did his general medical training in London teaching hospitals. He then moved to Cambridge in order to specialise in blood disorders where he also did a PhD on lymphoma genetics. In 2016, Asst Prof Grigoropoulos was honoured by Singapore’s National Medical Research Council with a Transition Award in order to be able to continue his research while actively treating patients.

Panel Discussion

Emerging COVID-19 Hot Topic: Special Review for COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global challenge requiring intensive commitment of healthcare resources, public health interventions, private investment and geopolitical coordination. A central pillar to combatting the pandemic has been rapid research and development into diagnostic, therapeutic and prophylactic tools for COVID-19. This urgency has not meant that ethical standards for research should fall or be set aside, but rather that the processes for ethical review of research must be accelerated and streamlined to whatever extent feasible.

In this context, healthcare institutions in Singapore adapted existing ethics review structures to create a new domain-specific IRB specifically to review COVID-19 related studies in a rapid manner. This panel discussion will summarize this special review process, reflecting on what was achieved, challenges emerged along the way, and lessons for the future of ethics review – both for potential global health emergencies, as well as more routine biomedical research.

< Back to Speakers' Information