Principlism versus Utilitarianism in Translational Medicine Ethics

Translational medicine is a rather new research area, as it was mentioned for the first time in 1996, in the PubMed publication index, while bearing as a motto “From bench to bedside”. Its complexity and novelty manage to raise a series of problems, in both medical and bioethical terms. The intricacy of translational medicine resides in the implication of several related research areas, such as tissue engineering, gene therapy, cell therapy, regenerative medicine, molecular diagnosis etc, all of them aiming to orientate current biomedical knowledge toward new effective drugs and medical approaches, while the increase of patients’ beneficence is closely looked upon. The promises of several research areas in translational medicine draw certain pressures upon biomedical studies and researchers, pressures made by research policy makers, politicians, patients, entrepreneurs, and also by the civil society and which bring several ethical challenges to all the above-mentioned stakeholders. Therefore, making good ethical decisions is mandatory. In this paper, I wish to discuss translational medicine ethics from the perspective of principlism and utilitarianism and also suggest rationales for considering the two theories on bioethics as complementary rather than conflicting. A parallel shall be drawn between the four principles of bioethics (acknowledged either by the Anglo-American or by the European principlism) and utilitarian bioethics, which are considered mere tools serving the same purpose: patients’ welfare.