CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Rijul Kocchar (Harvard University)

 

CUSAS Seminar with Dr. Rijul Kocchar (Harvard University)As Drugs Fade: The withering antibiotic commons in America

This talk examines the historical factors behind why no new classes of antibiotics have been developed by pharmaceutical companies since the 1980s, better remembered as the high noon of economic deregulation. Set amongst venture capitalists, pharmaceutical scientists, biomedical specialists, and biosecurity regulators for food-production, meat, and medicine, I interrogate a commonsense mantra—that antibiotics are an unprofitable domain of investment since mutating bugs destroy profitability derived from patented, stable drugs. Yet, given urgent demands for novel antibiotics to fight infections (including against hospital-acquired infections with COVID-19, and the opioid crisis where needle-transmitted “superbugs” pose a growing menace), new forms of collaborations for funneling resources to accelerate the development of these anti-“drugs for life” are emerging. This is instantiating partnerships between biotech companies, academic labs, and various wings of the US government’s national security apparatus. At the same time, draft federal legislations such as the PASTEUR Act aim to provide public “push-pull” funding mechanisms to rekindle pharmaceutical interest in new antibiotic drug development, long in the wake of the midcentury triumphs with an arsenal of antibiotics that included penicillin, streptomycin, carbapenenems, etc. Taken together, these maneuvers are reconfiguring questions of public good, free markets, preparedness, and national security implicated in the survival and sustenance of what might be denoted as an "antibiotic commons." Such partnerships, in turn, include provisioning alternatives to antibiotics to the American public, particularly bacteriophages—a virus that devours bacteria—which was used for over a century in the Soviet Union, has an early 20th century trace in American biotechnology, and which is being revived today for compassionate, emergency-use therapies to patients without viable antibiotic options. At a moment in history marked by climactic antibiotic imperilment, these measures open up space for reconsidering the telos of technomedical epistemology and praxis, particularly in the cultural work of making a Soviet, "socialist"-associated technique of infection control increasingly acceptable as an experimental medical practice in 21st century America. Yet, the underlying question persists, one which this talk helps parse: who pays, and with what value, to ensure the survival, sustenance, and stability of an antibiotic pipeline geared to the future and to the common good?

 

Rijul Kochhar is a historian of science and an anthropologist. He teaches at Harvard University.