Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of MedicinesA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued. Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Public Knowledge into Pharmaceutical Assets | 23 |
Pharmasset | 49 |
Chasing the Golden Snitch and a Hepatitis C Gold Rush | 59 |
Following Gileads Hepatitis C Money | 67 |
The Struggle over Value and Treatment Access | 74 |
From Financialization to Public Purpose for Health 104 | 104 |
Other editions - View all
Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines Victor Roy Limited preview - 2023 |
Common terms and phrases
acquisition analysts antiviral Apath assets Atripla Bayh-Dole Act billion biomedical biotechnology Capital IQ clinical trials Committee on Finance company’s compounds corporate cost curative cure disease drug companies drug development process drug prices dynamic earnings Earnings Call economic Emory University example executives financial actors financial markets financialized drug development future Gilead Sciences global growth health policy health systems hepatitis C drug hepatitis C treatments Hepatitis C Virus innovation Institute intellectual property interferon Journal of Medicine Lazonick licensing maximizing shareholder value Mazzucato Medicaid ment middle-income countries National nucleoside pandemic Pharma pharmaceutical companies pharmaceutical industry Pharmasset political potential pricing and value prodrug public health public investments regimens replicon revenue risk SBIR Schinazi scientists sector Senate Committee share buybacks share price significant social sofosbuvir sofosbuvir-based medicines sofosbuvir-based treatments speculative stock market strategy therapies treatment access Truvada vaccine valuation value extraction venture capital Wall Street