US hospitals to ask patients for right to sell their tissue

Several academic hospitals in the United States are forming partnerships with biotechnology companies to provide them with human tissue for research, treatment, and drug development purposes, in a series of arrangements which raise wide legal and ethical issues.

Harvard University's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina are among the latest academic hospitals to join such ventures.

Both of these institutions have entered into agreements with Ardais, a genomics startup company, which …