TECHNIS is pleased to invite you to a free webinar. TECHNIS webinars focus on recent legal, economic, managerial, ethical and policy issues related to technological innovation. Our approach is interdisciplinary and presentations are given by experts in different fields such as economics, law, management, STS, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Webinar presentations last for 20min and are followed by a 40min discussion.

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 18th of March 2025 at 11:00 London time i.e. 12:00 Brussels time, 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Susi Geiger, University College Dublin. The title of the talk is "Peak Phama. Why the Pharmaceutical Industry has to change now".

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator is Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. 

Join Zoom Meeting: https://uoc-gr.zoom.us/j/84642993639?pwd=4mpCWh3kXwL7TeODcCa7UZ9cKEbbYU.1
Meeting ID: 846 4299 3639 

Passcode: 532636

NOTE: To participate please contact Andreas Panagopoulos at least an hour prior to the webinar.

Abstract: Recent technological developments in the pharmaceutical sector have fuelled rapid price increases of advanced therapies. Broader advancements, including AI and open science, too have started to reshape the contours of pharmaceutical innovation. Many of these shifts are generally discussed in a ‘crisis’ frame, pointing toward a dystopian future of fully-privatized medical markets with access to high-tech therapies for the few. Yet, these shifts have also triggered efforts around developing alternative modes of organizing pharmaceutical research and deployment, fuelling hope for a more 'utopian', communitarian reorganisation of the healthcare system. Examples include patient- and clinician-driven innovation, hospital-based manufacturing, and drug repurposing.

In this talk, I will briefly outline the historical arc that has brought us to the current point of what I claim is 'peak pharma' - an inclination point where systems will accelerate into one of two directions - health dystopia or utopia. Siding with the positive, I will then move more deeply into one particular 'utopian' kind of pharmaceutical system reorganisation that we see developing in many small pockets already: the pharmaceutical commons. I drawtogether an overview of the landscape of current communing effortswithsome of the very fertile current commons scholarship.