Pharmaceutical innovation and its crisis: drug markets, screening, and the dialectics of value

Abstract

This article explores recent debates on innovation in the drug sector, focusing on the ways in which the articulation of use value and exchange value operates in the hegemonic—Northern—form of pharmaceutical capitalism. Taking the category ‘crisis of innovation’ as an entry point and engaging with the economics literature in which it has been discussed for nearly twenty years, this paper uses the vast historiography of post-WWII pharmacy to propose a critical historical understanding of the crisis. It argues that the features to which the crisis discourses point originate in the long-term contradictions between use value and exchange that affect the dominant regime of pharmaceutical innovation, i.e., the screening regime of research and development. These tensions have accumulated over the past two decades and become more visible, leading to a new reading of the present turn toward bio-capital, i.e., toward biotechnology and a more speculative (financial) economy of pharmacy. The last section of the paper discusses the theoretical implications of this hypothesis.