a) Members of the Board of Directors of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, committees and external assessors (“members”) shall be considered disqualified if a member has a:
i. personal;
ii. professional; or
iii. financial
interest in the outcome of an application: for example, if the member supervises the applicant; is employed in the scientific unit of which the applicant is a leader; or if the member has a family relationship to the applicant. In this context, family relationships are defined as:
i. children, grandchildren, etc.;
ii. parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, etc.;
iii. grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.; and
iv. spouses, partners, cohabitants and their parents, brothers, sisters, children, etc.
b) A member shall be prohibited from participating in assessing any application from an applicant with whom the member has collaborated on research or has co-published a book, scientific article, report or the like within the previous 5 years. Nevertheless, the type and closeness of the collaboration shall determine whether this collaboration is deemed a conflict of interest.
c) A member who is ineligible in relation to an application shall also be ineligible in relation to other applications that compete with the application in question. However, this shall only apply in situations in which the pool of applications amounts to five or less. If a final decision is made on the application or applications to which the member’s ineligibility is linked and this application or these applications are thereby no longer being assessed, the member in question may participate in assessing the remaining applications.
