Compound Solutions. Pharmaceutical Alternatives for Global Health

Claiming 1.5 million lives in 2015, tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease. Because of the population it overwhelmingly affects, however, pharmaceutical companies are uninterested in developing better drugs for the disease. Compound Solutions examines Product Development Partnerships (PDPs), which arose early in the twenty-first century to develop new drugs and vaccines for infectious diseases in low-income countries. Here, for the first time, is a sustained examination of PDPs: the work they do, the partnerships they form, their mission, and their underlying philosophy of addressing global health needs—with implications that extend well beyond tuberculosis.

Focusing on two PDPs for tuberculosis—the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance) and Aeras (a nonprofit focused on vaccine development)—Susan Craddock argues that PDPs do much more than product development. As innovative sites of humanitarian pharmaceutical production, they are contravening mainstream pharmaceutical production by tying drug and vaccine research to global health needs rather than shareholder demand. In largely untethering the profit incentive from pharmaceutical production, Craddock shows, PDPs exhibit more creative and efficient scientific practices, reshaping regulatory norms and implementing more ethical forms of clinical trials that enhance community engagement and capacity building. 

An unparalleled, interdisciplinary analysis of PDPs as politically, socially, scientifically, and economically innovative sites of pharmaceutical production, Compound Solutions is a must for readers in the fields of public health, science and technology studies, and medical social science.

Susan Craddock is professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty, and Deviance in San Francisco (Minnesota, 2000) and the coeditor of Influenza and Public Health and HIV and AIDS in Africa.