There are many international guidelines that have been developed to ensure that the conduct of researches by countries, institutions and individuals are ethical. There are, however, unique opportunities as well as challenges in research in the ASEAN region which mandate not only adherence to these guidelines but which necessitate regional as well as individual country efforts to ensure that biomedical researches uphold the dignity, ensure safety and protect the rights of participants. Some of the challenges are: the widespread poverty or uneven distribution of resources in developing countries which cause patients to participate in clinical trials to avail of services that otherwise are inaccessible, lack of a research infrastructure that makes ethics review of protocols inadequate or slow, and lack of post-trial access to medications which have been tested in precisely the populations that need these drugs. The aim of this paper is to review the ethical challenges in health research encountered in Asia and to describe the regional efforts being undertaken to address them.