Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the sociology of expectations and the anthropological literature on gift-giving, we interrogate the promissory nature of virtual drug development partnerships for neglected tropical diseases, and their ability to colonize the future landscape of global pharmaceutical markets.

Paper long abstract:

The development of new therapies against 'neglected' tropical diseases (NTDs) requires, we are told, new forms of collaboration between private and public actors. Pharmaceutical companies, academic research institutions and philanthropic organizations must join forces in drug development. Over the last decade, a plethora of public-private partnerships have emerged to tackle perceived 'market failure'. Along with patent pools, online databases of proprietary assets, and 'open laboratories', these arrangements are changing the landscape of property relations across the distributed networks of NTD research. They not only challenge the modernist distinction between public and private, but also highlight the 'complex domaining effects' (Hayden 2010) these categories themselves entail.

On the basis of ethnographic research into global health collaborations, documentary analysis and interviews with participating actors, this paper explores the work afforded by the discourse of the virtual. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we interrogate the promissory nature of drug development partnerships, and linked to this, their ability to colonize the future landscape of global pharmaceutical markets. We explore the traditional exclusionary function of property rights in this world of seemingly unfettered collaboration. When 'partnering' becomes the operative term and sharing the constitutive mechanism of expanding research collaborations, how are the limits of the network produced, where and how is the network cut? We turn to the anthropological literature on gift-giving and inalienable possessions to understand the boundaries of participation in the moral fold of partnership, and how the definition of these boundaries transform both the targets and agents of drug development initiatives.