Community-Based Labs and Radical Innovations in Open Source Pharmaceuticals

• In Event: Commoning Knowledge: Regeneration Through S&T

Abstract

The capitalistic model of pharmaceutical production and distribution dominates the current landscape of drug development, structuring the regulatory and economic politics underpinning the process, shaping biomedical scientific praxis, and propagating stratified access to lifesaving medications. In response to this system that puts profits over lives, grassroots efforts have emerged to interrupt and reimagine pharmaceutical development, offering novel alternatives that place medicine affordability, as well as access to biomedical research and technology, at the center. One such effort is the formation of an open source model for pharmaceuticals in community biology laboratories. Within these community-based labs (sometimes called citizen science, biohacker, and/or DIY bio labs), lay scientists utilize open source principles and integrate bioengineering efforts with broader strategy to fundamentally challenge current processes for the manufacture and distribution of biopharmaceuticals. These spaces offer an important site for STS scholars to examine how commons based knowledge practices could disrupt longstanding pharmaceutical markets. This paper draws on ethnographic research in a community lab engineering an insulin biosimilar, or generic long-acting insulin for the affordable treatment of diabetes. Such an initiative is innovative on multiple fronts, including challenging societal norms on where biomedical research can and should be done, opposing structural underpinnings limiting access to pharmaceuticals, and offering a framework for insurgent practices of scientific knowledge production. Placed against the contextual backdrop of technoscientific corporations and academic institutions as the dominant engineering site of scientific knowledge, this study analyzes how community labs emerge as possible sites for countering hegemonic models of pharmaceutical knowledge production.

Author

• Nicole Foti, University of California, San Francisco