Short abstract:

Here the findings of a four year, four country international project examining social pharmaceutical innovation (SPIN) are presented. An overview of what SPIN accounts for is provided, along with key features of SPIN across case studies, as well recommendations for advancing it.

Long abstract:

Social pharmaceutical innovation (or SPIN) refers to modes of innovation that advance novel forms of collaboration with a wide range of actors, which breaks with conventional pharmaceutical innovation practices in an institutional way to produce more treatments that are more affordable and more equally accessed. Over the course of four years an international consortium of STS researchers from Brazil, Canada, France and the Netherlands have been examining cases of SPIN: what are they, how are they working, what challenges are the coming up against? This paper provides a brief report on that work. We show how SPINs are re-organizing partnerships in innovation processes and describe key features of how innovation occurs in this space. We also describe how SPINs are changing the way data is gathered and how evidence is constructed, as well as providing new routes for patients to access treatments in more sustainable ways. We conclude with some recommendations for supporting SPIN as an alternative to the dominant model of pharmaceutical innovation, and some STS insights in the boundaries that are blurred in the innovation process by way of SPIN.