Pharmapolitics in Russia

Olga Zvonareva

Description

Over the last one hundred years, the Russian pharmaceutical industry has undergone multiple dramatic transformations, which have taken place alongside tectonic political shifts in society associated with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a post-Soviet order. Pharmapolitics in Russia argues that different versions of the Russian pharmaceutical industry took shape in a co-productive process, equally involving political ideologies and agendas, and technoscientific developments and constraints. Drawing on interviews, documents, literature, and media sources, Olga Zvonareva examines critical points in the history of the pharmaceutical industry in Russia. This includes the emergence of Soviet drug research and development, the short-lived neoliberal turn of the 1990s, and the ongoing efforts of the Russian government to boost local pharmaceutical innovation, which in turn produced a now widely shared vision of an independent and self-sufficient nation. The resulting industrial organizations and practices, she argues, came to embed and transmit particular imaginaries of the nation and its future.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Drug Development and Politics

1. The Soviet Pharmapolitical Regime: Promising Social Justice

2. Neoliberal Experiments in the Post-Soviet State: Producing an Alternative Vision of Society

3. The Arrival of Commercial Clinical Trials in Russia: Generating Multiple Value

4. Pharma-2020 Policy: Defining the Problems of the Russian Pharmaceutical Industry

5. Innovation Environment: Collaborating in Drug Development and Production

6. Pharmapolitics in Russia and Beyond

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Russie
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques
• National
• Central
• Russia
• Soviet Union
• Sociology
• USSR

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438479934
• Langue: English

Extrait

PHARMAPOLITICS IN
RUSSIA
SUNY series in National Identities

Thomas M. Wilson, editor
PHARMAPOLITICS IN
RUSSIA
Making Drugs and Rebuilding the Nation
OLGA ZVONAREVA
Cover art: iStock by Getty Images.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Zvonareva, Olga, author.
Title: Pharmapolitics in Russia : making drugs and rebuilding the nation / Olga Zvonareva, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series in National Identities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479910 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479934 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my father
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Drug Development and Politics
Chapter 1 The Soviet Pharmapolitical Regime: Promising Social Justice
Chapter 2 Neoliberal Experiments in the Post-Soviet State: Producing an Alternative Vision of Society
Chapter 3 The Arrival of Commercial Clinical Trials in Russia: Generating Multiple Value
Chapter 4 Pharma-2020 Policy: Defining the Problems of the Russian Pharmaceutical Industry
Chapter 5 Innovation Environment: Collaborating in Drug Development and Production
Chapter 6 Pharmapolitics in Russia and Beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Tables 2.1 Dynamics of pharmaceutical production in Russia (in comparable prices) 2.2 Dynamics of pharmaceutical production in Russia according to therapeutic categories 2.3 Top-ten Russian pharmaceutical producing companies in 1996 4.1 Top-twenty producers in sales revenue on the Russian pharmaceutical market in 2016
Figures 4.1 Russian market composition in billion rubles in 2016 5.1 Divergent definitions of innovation 5.2 Types of incubators 5.3 Types of accelerators
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 4 was originally published in O. Zvonareva, N. Engel, N. Kutishenko, and K. Horstman (2017), “(Re)configuring Research Value: International Commercial Clinical Trials in the Russian Federation,” BioSocieties 12 (3): 392–414. Part of the data used in chapter 5 on Pharma-2020 policy were included in another volume: O. Zvonareva (2018), “(Re)imagining the Nation? Boosting Local Drug Development in Contemporary Russia,” in Health, Technologies, and Politics in Post-Soviet Settings: Navigating Uncertainties , ed. O. Zvonareva, E. Popova, and K. Horstman (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
Introduction
Drug Development and Politics
On November 30, 2009, a press conference titled “Pharma-2020: Future of the Russian pharmaceutical industry” begins with this introduction by the moderator:
Today we are discussing an important topic related to the situation with the Russian pharmaceutical market. This is a crucial topic that is relevant for many, relevant in a personal way. Everybody knows that there is a problem of supplying Russian people with inexpensive, quality drugs produced locally. This problem has not been solved yet, and the government is continuously working on it. Also the industry experiences problems such as lack of modern equipment and nontransparency of state procurement. A strategy that does not only solve these immediate problems, but also defines the future of this market, has been developed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Before the floor is given to Sergey Tsib, a representative of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the attention of the audience is directed toward a large screen where a video recording of then-president Dmitry Medvedev’s speech is played. The recording was produced earlier the same month during the traditional presidential address to the Federal Assembly. On the screen, the press conference attendees see Georgievsky Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace with hundreds of people listening to the president, who is standing on a large podium with Russian flags in the background. Medvedev says:
In the nearest future we will substantially increase the production of our own drugs. … Already in five years the share of local production on the pharmaceutical market has to become not less than a quarter, while by 2020, more than half of all medicines. This is the aim.
Federal Assembly members applaud. The video is then turned off, and Sergey Tsib turns on his microphone. He explains that after about a year and a half of work, the Ministry of Industry and Trade is ready to present the first programmatic document in the entire course of the country’s pharmaceutical industry, titled the Strategy for the Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry of the Russian Federation (Pharma-2020). “We have every chance to meet the targets … specified by the president,” Tsib adds. He finishes by delineating two main tasks: to improve the competitiveness of the Russian pharmaceutical industry and to ensure pharmaceutical security of the country as a whole.
This episode goes directly to the heart of the issues this book explores. At the very beginning of the press conference, the moderator announces that the topic at hand is local research, development, and production of drugs. Yet the ensuing statements and exchange are not limited to the matters of (bio)pharmaceutical science and technology. In fact, the discussion swiftly moves to anything but science and technology as such: societal problems of access to quality drugs, economic questions of dominance in the country’s internal market, and issues of national security. What stands out is how drug research and innovation have made their way to the highest political levels and become involved with questions of public good provision, national interests, and the country’s international standing.
I encountered these engagements between science, technology, and politics when I watched the recordings of this press conference and other events, browsed through media publications, talked to those involved in the pharmaceuticals field in Russia, and went everywhere my research project took me. Of course, by now it is commonly acknowledged that drug development and production are not a matter of technoscientific developments alone. Media have covered how pharmaceutical industry promotion practices work to establish conditions that make specific diagnoses and prescriptions as frequent as possible. Scholars have produced critiques of burgeoning consumption of medicines and continual growth of disease categories, health risks, and costs. Widespread debates about evidence have highlighted how the pharmaceutical industry carefully curates available knowledge through publication planning when companies and their agents shape multiple steps in the research, data analysis, writing, and publication of articles in ways that remain hidden from the public eye. These instances make it abundantly clear that drug innovations are shaped and driven not only by scientific breakthroughs but also by agendas, ambitions, and profits.
While previous research has demonstrated how diseases and patients emerge together with revenues and capital, in this book I analyze relationships between pharmaceuticals and society from a different angle. My concern here is not so much with the politics of the markets already extensively discussed by other scholars; rather, it is with politics of the state—closely related, but until now much less explored by critical social sciences. I am interested in how visions of the nation emerge together with state-led pharmaceutical industry development efforts. Following this interest, in this book I trace how pharmaceutical innovation in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia has become entangled with processes of rebuilding the nation and reimagining its identity and future, merging into what I call “pharmapolitics.”
The case of (post-)Soviet pharmapolitics provides a fruitful contrast to common critiques of capitalist pharmaceutical industry and allows an opportunity to reexamine our ideas about governance of pharmaceutical development and production. Many accounts of Soviet science and industry remain centered on the question of political interference that introduces bias into knowledge produced and curbs innovation. This question reemerges in relation to the Russian state-dominated pharmaceutical arena as well. Yet, in essence, both critiques of profit-pursuing capitalist pharmaceutical industry and critiques of the power-accumulating nondemocratic state share the same ideal of technoscience untainted by market influences or political interference. Critical social science scholarship, in particular science and technology studies (STS), has long sought to disabuse us of this ideal, which implies a possibility of straightforwardly distinguishing technoscience and politics and keeping them separate. In this book, a view of pharmaceutical development as always shot through with political concerns and engaged in societal transformations is taken as a starting point to examine specific forms of pharmaceutical technoscience-society interactions and their consequences in a situation where it is not politics of the market but politics of the state that comes