医薬品の社会的形成

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タイトル別名
  • THE SOCIAL SHAPING OF PRESCRIBED DRUGS
  • イヤクヒン ノ シャカイテキ ケイセイ

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This paper is an attempt to explore the process of drug discovery and development. Although pharmaceuticals are crucial in modern society, there are few empirical studies that examine the process of drug innovation fully and closely. Using the approach of the social shaping of technology, which focuses on technical contents and social processes of technological change, this work demonstrates the complex interactions between human actors, non-human entities, and institutional and structural factors in the process of drug discovery and development. Two case studies are included: Cimetidine, an anti-ulcer drug discovered and developed in the UK, and tamsulosin, a drug for the treatment of urination disorder, discovered and developed in Japan. Both cases show that the process of drug innovation is not totally rational and linear but political and interactive. Four aspects of drug innovation are identified, namely the shaping of the compound, of the application, of organizational authorization and of the market. In each aspect, various human actors, non-human entities, and institutional and structural factors are differently involved and interacted with each other. These different aspects of drug shaping themselves also interact and interdependent with each other. This paper concludes that the linear model that regards an innovation process as a unilateral one from R & D through production to market is not appropriate to understand innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Instead, it proposes a view that drugs are shaped through a highly interactive and political process. This implies that the idea that huge research investment or good technological seeds automatically lead to successful products is quite misleading. Social activities including networking, intra-organizational politics and marketing are also essential for the shaping of drugs. Technology management in the pharmaceutical industry should recognize these activities as opportunities for promoting innovation.

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