Geographies of responsibility: Spatial and temporal domaining in virtual drug development

Global health’s new ‘geographies of responsibility’: Spatial and temporal domaining in virtual drug development

The organization, funding and implementation of global health research is undergoing transformative change. The effective development of new therapies against tropical diseases requires, we are told, new forms of collaboration between private and public actors. Pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutions and philanthropic organizations must join forces in drug development. Over the last decade, a plethora of public-private partnerships have emerged to tackle perceived ‘market failure’. Along with patent pools, online databases of proprietary assets, and ‘open laboratories’, these arrangements are changing the landscape of property relations across the distributed networks of global health research. They not only challenge the modernist distinction between public and private, but also highlight the ‘complex domaining effects’ (Hayden 2010) these categories themselves entail.  In this paper, we turn to the spatial and temporal dominating that ‘virtual’ drug development occasions in global health research.  If partnership is the watchword of development, then the virtual is the arena in which such partnership is to be constituted.  Indeed, a key selling point of these networks is their distributed nature, the absence or levity of a permanent organizational infrastructure anchoring the research activities. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are central to the rationale and operations of these networks, but not in the way economic theory would predict. Rather than being used as a tool to exclude competitors from the use of a particular innovation, IPRs are presented as the lever the enables new forms of collaboration, the attractor that binds diverse interests to a shared mission. It is the sharing of IP, and proprietary assets more generally, that creates and gives material reality to new drug development networks. Instead of being used to demarcate public and private domains, property rights are here deployed to increase the porosity of that boundary.On the basis of ongoing ethnographic research into global health collaborations, documentary analysis and interviews with participating actors, this paper explores the work afforded by the discourse of the virtual. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we interrogate the promissory nature of drug development partnerships, and linked to this, their ability to colonize the future landscape of global pharmaceutical markets.  We explore the traditional exclusionary function of property rights in this world of seemingly unfettered collaboration. When ‘partnering’ becomes the operative term and sharing the constitutive mechanism of expanding research collaborations, how are the limits of the network produced, where and how is the network cut? We turn to to the anthropological literature on gift-giving and inalienable possessions to understand the boundaries of participation in the moral fold of partnership, and how the definition of these boundaries transform both the targets and agents of drug development initiatives. 


Global health’s new ‘geographies of responsibility’: Spatial and temporal domaining in virtual drug development 

L’organisation, le financement et la mise en place de la recherche en santé globale est dans une dynamique de transformation. Le développement de nouveaux traitements pour les maladies tropicales, exigerait de nouvelles formes de partenariats public-privé. Au cours de la dernière décennie, une pléthore d’alliances de cette nature a émergée. Plusieurs types d’arrangements ont été créés, lesquels modifient la perception de la propriété et mettent à mal la dichotomie public-privé. Si le partenariat est un élément clé du développement, l’espace virtuel constitue l’arène au sein de laquelle ce partenariat doit se construire. D’ailleurs une caractéristique de ces réseaux est leur dispersion, l’absence d’une infrastructure ancrant/localisant les activités de recherche. La propriété intellectuelle en tant que levier permettant de nouvelles formes de collaboration est au cœur de leur mode de fonctionnement. Loin donc de servir à séparer le public et le privé, la propriété intellectuelle accroît ici la porosité de cette dichotomie. Sur la base d’un travail de recherche ethnographique en cours au sein d’alliances en santé globale, l’analyse de documents et des entretiens avec différents acteurs, ce papier explore le travail que permet le discours du virtuel. En se basant sur la sociologie des espérances, il interrogera la nature engageante des alliances autour du médicament, leur capacité hégémonique et le rôle structurant de la propriété intellectuelle. L’analyse se s’appuiera sur la littérature autour de l’échange, la possession inaliénable pour comprendre les frontières de l’espace moral du partenariat d’une part et comment la production de ces frontières transforme les objets et les acteurs.