The long-awaited ‘Meeting Report of the OECD Conference on “Genome Editing: Applications in Agriculture—Implications for Health, Environment and Regulation”’ of the seminal OECD Conference, held on the 28. – 29. June 2018 has now been published (Transgenic Research, August 2019, Volume 28, Issue 3–4, pp 419–463; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-019-00154-1).
The Conference brought together policy makers, academia, innovators and other stakeholders involved in the topic, in order to take stock of the current technical developments and implementations of genome editing, as well as their applications in various areas of agriculture and the implications they give rise to; it aimed to provide a clearer understanding of the regulatory considerations raised by products of genome editing, pointing towards a coherent policy approach to facilitate innovations involving genome editing.
The Meeting Report contains in-depth summaries of the presentations of each invited speaker given at the Conference (including those that did not provide full articles to the Conference Proceedings); it introduces and discusses 32 state-of-the-art contributions to the ongoing global debate on genome editing.
The full proceedings of the conference “Genome Editing: Applications in Agriculture – Implications for Health, Environment and Regulation”, including papers prepared subsequently by each of the speakers, has been published online at: Transgenic Research, Volume 28, Issue 2 Supplement.
As part of the conference organising team, SwiftEST is indebted to the many genome editing experts that attended the OECD Conference from all over the world, in order to provide scientific evidence and though-provoking opinions to the debate.
Acknowledgement
The OECD CPF (Central Priority Fund) project on “Health and Environmental Safety in Genome Editing Applications” represents a joint effort of the OECD Directorates of Environment (ENV), Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), Trade and Agriculture (TAD) and Public Governance and Territorial Development (GOV), with specific support from the OECD’s Internal Co-ordination Group for Biotechnology (ICGB), which is coordinated by the Environment Directorate. In addition, the “OECD Conference on Genome Editing: Applications in Agriculture—Implications for Health, Environment and Regulation” was supported by the OECD’s Co-operative Research Programme (CRP).
