MEDICI

Over recent decades, the notion of ‘conflict of interest’ has become widespread as the lens through which to consider the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the construction of scientific knowledge, on decisions taken by public authorities, and on prescription practices. However, despite the key role of medicines in health care and biomedical research, the strategic position of the pharmaceutical industry, and the increasing number of health crises, there has been little focus on this issue in the social sciences, unlike law and biomedical science. Our multidisciplinary project (sociology, history, political science, and law) intends to analyse the problematisation of conflicts of interest in the pharmaceutical sector. We aim to understand how conflicts of interest have become a public problem and to analyse how the mechanisms used to manage them result from mobilisations, power relations, and compromises. Our intention is also to understand the effects (or lack of effects) that these dynamics have on the practices of actors in the sector (doctors, experts, officials from medicines agencies, firms, patient organisations, etc. ). Our project is based on collaboration between teams from three research centres with complementary expertise. Six scientific tasks will be carried out, with a seventh devoted to comparison between studies but also between our field of inquiry and other sectors concerned by conflicts of interest. The first three scientific tasks will focus on different social spaces in which the problem of conflicts of interest has been raised (medical journals, regulatory authorities, and relationships between industry actors and doctors). The three other tasks will examine this work of problematisation looking at the specific ecosystems created by particularly controversial therapeutic classes offering a certain historical distance: appetite suppressants, hormone treatments and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Practice-focused empirical work is lacking in this area and our studies will therefore call upon a wide range of data (interviews, archives, prosopography and analysis of career paths, content and bibliometric analysis of publications, and virtual focus groups). The main focus of the project will be the French case. However, given the weight of the European Union in the legal regulation and evaluation of medicines, as well as the international nature of knowledge production in this field (with the United States playing a key role in this regard), our study will not be limited to France. In a highly controversial context, our project aims to make an important contribution to the social science of health and to science studies, while also directly contributing to public debate and to the reflections developed on this topic within the field of medicines.