4 May 2023, Cairo – Dr Palitha Mahipala, WHO Representative in Pakistan, recently visited the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation in Karachi, to address a pilot workshop on benchmarking ethics oversight of health-related research with human participants.

The Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture was inaugurated in October 2004 in Karachi, recognizing the need for ethics-related education and research in Pakistan that is relevant and responsive to local cultural and social realities. The Centre remains the only such centre in Pakistan today. It was designated a WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics in 2017, the first for bioethics in the Region.

Dr Mahipala, who chaired a session, said that it was a great achievement that the Centre had become the first WHO Collaborating Centre for Bioethics in the Region, entering its second term as a WHO collaborating centre in 2021, and he extended WHO's support to the Centre.