Interview with Dr. Bruno Steinkraus, Chief Scientific Officer at Hummingbird Diagnostics GmbH
A new article from the EPAD consortium entitled “”Ready for What?”: Timing and Speculation in Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Development” has recently been published in SAGE Journals.
In this paper, authors examined challenges of time and recruitment in the context of the move to precision or stratified medicine, focusing on “readiness”: the state of being ready to participate in, or launch, a pharmaceutical drug trial. They addressed concerns and practical realignments within a large-scale project: the EPAD study.
Abstract:
“Readiness cohorts” are an innovation in clinical trial design to tackle the scarcity of time and people in drug studies. This has emerged in response to the challenges of recruiting the “right” research participants at the “right time” in the context of precision medicine. In this paper, we consider how the achievement of “readiness” aligns temporalities, biologies, and market processes of pharmaceutical innovation: how the promise of “willing bodies” in research emerges in relation to intertwined economic and biological time imperatives. Drawing on long-term engagement with the field of Alzheimer’s disease prevention and interviews with researchers from academia and the pharmaceutical industry, we describe the discursive construction and practical arrangement of readiness. This paper contributes to understandings of temporal specificity, or “timing,” within prevention research and casts critical light on the way this specificity—the threshold for “trial readiness”—relates to an opaque and highly speculative drug development pipeline. Extending the study of biomedical potential, as that which holds promise but may not yet exist, we consider how absences operate in adaptive trials. By highlighting these absences (“ready for what?”), we outline an opportunity for socio-ethical research to intervene in the speculative gaps of drug development.
Congratulations to the authors Natassia F. Brenman and Richard Milne! You can read the paper here.
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