Overview

Despite a century of advances in modern medicine, as well as the rapid development of Covid vaccines, the global pharmaceutical industry has largely failed to bring to market drugs that actually cure disease. Why? And looking further... How can government policies stimulate investment in the development of curative drugs? Is there an untapped potential for ""natural medicines"" in new drug discovery? How have private–public sector partnerships transformed the ways we innovate? To what extent are medicinal plant biodiversity and human health codependent? Addressing this range of increasingly critical questions, Kathryn Ibata-Arens analyses the rise and decline of the global innovation system for new drug development and proposes a policy framework for fast-tracking the implementation of new discoveries and preparing for future pandemics.

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9781626379695

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Reviews

“A fascinating and enlightening book that resonates singularly with the current pandemic, and also with the environmental crisis. Based on a rich conceptualization and in-depth analysis of various examples, the book invites us to question the effectiveness and sustainability of the Western system of biomedical innovation … and to turn our gaze to alternative innovation systems that are much older but that have renewed relevance in the last decades.” —Etienne Nouguez, Sciences Po Paris

Ibata-Arens's accessibly written, and timely, book offers a compelling argument: that profit-and patent-driven drug development must be replaced by a global system of sharing innovation commons, including those harvested from nature. Short of this transformation, pandemics may become more common than we currently imagine!

Author Information

Kathryn C. Ibata-Arens is Vincent de Paul Professor of Political Economy at DePaul University.

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