Development Reimagined: Anne Pollock

Development Reimagined Speaker Series

“Redrawing the Global Map of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacture: Conditions of Possibility and Constraints in South Africa”

Join us for the second talk in the Development Reimagined series, focused on the theme of disrupting development and the future through innovative approaches and new thinking. This talk features Anne Pollock, PhD, a professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. She is the author of “Medicating Race: Durable Preoccupations with Difference and Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery.”

This talk draws on Pollock’s research at iThemba Pharmaceuticals, a start up company that was founded in 2009 in the outskirts of Johannesburg with the mission of discovering new drugs for TB, HIV and malaria. Although the company failed, its example remains generative for understanding science, technology, and society.  In this talk, she will attend to the conditions of possibility and constraints on building drug discovery science capacity in South Africa, especially infrastructure, democratic imperatives, and international interest. It will focus on one route that iThemba Pharmaceuticals had hoped to pursue: building “green” pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in South Africa.

This would have involved implementing a process known as continuous flow chemistry. Flow chemistry provides an opportunity to reflect on temporality and materiality, both on the microlevel of the chemical reactions that are carried out to synthesize molecules and on the macrolevel of providing a route for South Africa to become a site of pharmaceutical innovation. In South Africa, it was not feasible to copy India’s model of building a pharmaceutical industry through large-scale manufacture of generic drugs, and thus flow chemistry offered a way to see the lack of current highly polluting infrastructures as a competitive advantage for building green infrastructures of the future. In a manner analogous to cell phones leapfrogging landlines in Africa, the lack of pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity becomes a condition of possibility for skipping to the next paradigm in drug manufacture. On the other hand, the endeavor’s failure illuminates the barriers faced by those seeking to redraw the global map of pharmaceutical research and production.

Anne Pollock, PhD, is a professor of global health and social medicine at King’s College London. She is the author of “Medicating Race: Durable Preoccupations with Difference and Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery.”