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Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over accessing a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When sofosbuvir-based medicines launched in 2013, they promised a cure for millions of patients worldwide with hepatitis C. But their sticker shock—the drug was dubbed "the $1,000-a-day pill"—intensified a global debate over the pricing of new medicines. Weaving extensive historical research with insights from political economy, science, and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
Roy's account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate boardrooms, public health meetings, and health centers to trace the ways sofosbuvir-based medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to supersede democracy and human health and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.
Open Access
Capitalizing a Cure How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
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About the Book
Reviews
"This is the best piece of nonfiction I have read in a long time. This book offers a fantastic, relevant, and necessary case study to understand how the financialization of the economy has affected the organization of industrial sectors by focusing on what has happened in the biopharmaceutical sector."—Marc-André Gagnon, Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy, Carleton University"This book is a riveting read that will strike fear in the heart of anybody who cares about the right to health, or thinks that the drive for profits should not supersede democracy or human need. It exposes why the price tags on medicines are so high, and what the systems are that keep it that way."—Salmaan Keshavjee, author of Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health