Global Trials, Local Bodies: Negotiating Difference and Sameness in Indian For-profit Clinical Trials

Abstract

Global clinical trials depend on a range of standards in order for research results to be comparable. As standardization is more than a mere technical exercise, tensions can arise when things are not uniform. This paper uses empirical data from interviews with principal investigators as well as Clinical Research Organization and pharmaceutical industry representatives working in India’s clinical trial industry to critically examine the ways Indian researchers navigate quests for standardization. It turns the analytical lens to the often obfuscated work of standardization aiming to transcend the biological and cultural specificity of research participants and research sites. Drawing on the concept of local biologies, it illustrates that the universal body presumed by clinical trial methodology is, in fact, a specifically Euro-American one: Indian participants not only need to be made globally comparable but also aligned with the drugs’ future consumers. Focusing on the tensions between biomedicine’s postulation of bodily universality and trial participants’ local biologies, this paper advances recent interventions problematizing the structural violence undergirding global clinical trials. It also contributes to the literature on local biologies in its discussion of how these are negotiated in Indian for-profit clinical trials.