intl

The medical profession's own ethics code for research on people, adopted in 1964 and revised most recently in 2024, which every cancer trial protocol cites: informed consent, independent ethics review, the welfare of the participant above the interests of science, and limits on placebo controls.

The international standard for how a clinical trial must be designed, run, recorded and reported so that regulators in the United States, Europe, Japan and now China will accept its data; the third version was adopted in 2025 to fit trials that use electronic records and run across many countries.

The 1994 world trade treaty that obliged every member country to grant twenty-year patents on medicines, and the 2001 declaration confirming that countries may still issue compulsory licences and protect public health; together they set the global terms on which cancer drugs are priced and copied.