Overview

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over accessing a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When sofosbuvir-based medicines launched in 2013, they promised a cure for millions of patients worldwide with hepatitis C. But their sticker shock—the drug was dubbed ""the $1,000-a-day pill""—intensified a global debate over the pricing of new medicines. Weaving extensive 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, public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways sofosbuvir-based 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 supersede democracy and human health and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.   

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9780520388710

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Roy convincingly shows through this example how venture capital, Wall Street, and the industry's top executives have turned small biotechnology firms and Big Pharma corporations into vehicles for extracting wealth from the health care system, even as these ostensibly health-promoting companies deny access to millions of needy people at home and abroad and undermine the financial well-being of patients and payers. * Washington Monthly *

Author Information

Victor Roy, MD, PhD, is a family physician, sociologist, and a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University.

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