Pharmaceutical life cycle management and access to medicine in times of COVID-19 pandemic

Gestion du cycle de vie des produits pharmaceutiques et accès aux médicaments en période de pandémie de COVID-19

Samira Guennif ()
Additional contact information
Samira Guennif: Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, IRIS - Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux Sociaux - sciences sociales, politique, santé - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - INSERM - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in March 2020, the urgent need to treat millions of patients worldwide led to a rush to drug "repurposing" (i.e. the recycling of existing drugs to treat new diseases) and induced strategic behavior by firms. Based on a literature survey and a review of online databases designed to collect unbiased secondary data, this article proposes a comparative case study of the divergent strategies followed by two firms holding patents (Abbvie and Gilead) for two repurposed drugs (respectively Kaletra and Remdesivir) in the midst of a pandemic. Establishing stylized facts and a chronology of events, this case study retraces the trajectory of two repurposed drugs for COVID-19 and explains why the firms adopted a more or less offensive life cycle management of their products in order to ensure exclusive marketing, to gain rents with the ultimate risk of limiting access to vital medicines. This study discusses finally the innovation system and its discontents in a new global pandemic.

Keywords: Life cycle management; Rent-seeking strategy; Drug repurposing; Innovation system; COVID-19 pandemic; Stratégie de recherche de rentes; Réaffectation des médicaments; Gestion du cycle de vie; Système d'innovation; Pandémie de COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-07-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in European Review of Service Economics and Management, 2024, 2024-1 (17), pp.119-149. ⟨10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-17198-0.p.0119⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05556453

DOI: 10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-17198-0.p.0119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().