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Short abstract

Solving the antibiotic innovation crisis is has become the preoccupation of various actors. The paper investigates how the ‘crisification’ of antibiotic innovation was used to prompt policy change, justify public funding and revive a stagnating biotech sector.

Long abstract

Antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) in conjunction with a significant ‘innovation drought’ in the pharmaceutical sector is broadly recognized as a pertinent global antibiotic innovation crisis.

This crisis has materialized through multiple paradoxes and morbid symptoms, including the (re-)emergence of highly lethal bacteria, bankruptcies of ‘successful’ companies, a massive brain drain away from antibiotic research, and industry and policy initiatives as ‘bridging solutions’ that seek to buy time rather than addressing the systemic roots of the crisis. Yet little attention has been paid to how this crisis narrative itself reshapes pharmaceutical policy and industry dynamics.

Solving this innovation crisis is seen as essential to mitigating AMR and has become the preoccupation of a whole array of different actors and stakeholders who are problematizing the crisis in terms of an interregnum, where potential solutions on the horizon are recognized as viable and effective, yet politically contested and thus cannot be (yet) borne.

This paper draws on extant STS accounts of pharmaceutical crisis to carefully delineate how AMR created both a specific crisis and an opportunity for the (European) biotech sector and its (re-)emerging innovation ecosystem. Based on ethnographic immersion in the field as part of the ERC project ALTERBIOTIC, this paper investigates how the ‘crisification’ of innovation was mobilized to prompt pro-industry policy change, justify public subsidy and channel private investment, and revive a stagnating biotech sector.

Doing so, it critically investigates how strategic uses and articulations of ‘crisis’ reproduce vested interests and lock in specific future pathways.