Abstract
Abstract This paper analyzes an emerging form of post-pharmaceutical health and its underlying regime of value in the global bioeconomy of regenerative stem cell-based medicine (RSCM). Animated by a vision to overcome drug-based therapies and their underlying political economies, RSCM pursues a form of regenerative health that is strikingly at odds with pharmaceutical regimes of drug research, regulation and therapy. To offer a theoretical account of these competing forms of health, the paper provides an analysis of the regimes of values that underpin pharmaceutical and regenerative health respectively. This analysis is done alongside three dimensions: the interlinkage between knowledge, technology and economic value creation; its relation to normative values and ethics; and conceptions and valuations of the biomedical subject and his/her body in biomedical research, intervention and innovation. Contrasting these two diverging regimes of health and value suggests that in RSCM the pharmaceutical logic of accumulating “surplus health” is not entirely dismissed but re-articulated in a regime based on the (re-)generation of regenerative biovalue through the extraction and ex vivo accumulation of “surplus vitality”. Finally, the article discusses “post-pharmaceutical health” as a sensitizing concept that offers new research avenues into emergent forms of health, value, and subjectivity beyond RSCM.
Highlights
Since the turn of the millennium, stem cell therapies have been central to an innovative biomedical paradigm, so-called “regenerative medicine” (Webster, 2013)
In regenerative stem cell-based medicine (RSCM) an incipient form of regenerative health can be identified that significantly diverges from the dominant pharmaceutical regime in many respects
The health regimes of the 20th century, which were based in large parts not merely on pharmaceutical drug products, and on specific pharmaceutical logics of producing and valuing health – economically, politically, ethically, are problematized and challenged by the emergent regime of RSCM
Summary
Since the turn of the millennium, stem cell therapies have been central to an innovative biomedical paradigm, so-called “regenerative medicine” (Webster, 2013). The health regimes of the 20th century, which were based in large parts not merely on pharmaceutical drug products, and on specific pharmaceutical logics of producing and valuing health – economically, politically, ethically –, are problematized and challenged by the emergent regime of RSCM.
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