Paper short abstract:

Future and terminal patients might not appear to align with each other, yet, maybe quite the contrary. In this paper I trace how different temporalities -that of the cell, scientists, doctors, patients and the nation state- articulate the development of new biomedical technology in China.

Paper long abstract:

"I travelled to China to buy life, a week, a couple of months, or maybe some years…" is a recurrent sentence used by Tina, a Spanish cancer patient, when talking about the CAR T-Cell therapy that she underwent in China. For Tina, as for many other cancer patients, time and life become synonyms that articulate their journey into the unknown: an experimental treatment in a foreign land with the objective to overcome their otherwise terminal condition. Yet, this quest for life, for a future, becomes entangled with other telos and temporalities.

Immunotherapy, especially Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy, has become the fifth pillar of cancer. This therapy consists in a personalized living drug that enhances the patient's own immune system. China, immersed in its transition to a knowledge economy and focusing in biopharma and translational science as key sectors of development, is strongly betting on this treatment, already hosting the largest number of clinical trials in the world.

Understanding pharmaceuticals, or in this case biopharmaceuticals, as "made and remade […] fluid, ever evolving in relation to their context" (Hardon and Sanabria 2017), I have ethnographically traced the development of CAR T-cell therapy from the laboratory to patients. I conducted 12 months of fieldwork among lab technicians, scientists, doctors, cancer patients and their families in Shenzhen and Beijing. In this paper, I focus on how different telos and temporalities -of the cell, mice, lab technicians, scientists, patients, doctors and the nationstate- articulate the development of new biomedical technologies.