Background

Medicines are a critical and pervasive manifestation of western science and technology that have significant impact not only on our health, but also on our economy, politics and social organisation. Pharmaceuticals and novel biotechnologies are key elements within this constellation that offer promises to improved and extend life, but primarily operating within for-profit market logics. These dynamics have led to the prioritization of research and development that favors market viability rather than patient need, have limited the accessibility of medicine based on ability to pay, and raised questions around fair pricing of medicine and the distribution of financial risk and reward in the innovation process.

For the past two decades Dr. Douglas’ work has explored these dynamics as they pertain to rare diseases, and in doing so developed the notion of “social pharmaceutical innovation”, which works to rethink how pharmaceutical research, development and deployment can be -and is- done in ways that prioritize patients needs and not necessarily markets. From 2019-2024 he was the Project Leader and Canadian Team Lead on an international collaborative project “Social Pharmaceutical Innovation”. His group is now extending that approach in an interdisciplinary collaborative project “Enabling technologies that facilitate socially responsible immunotherapies: Exploring sustainable innovation”.

Objective

The Douglas Research Group seeks to understand the social, scientific, political/regulatory, economic, and health systems dynamics through which pharmaceuticals and biotechnologies are researched, developed, and deployed (internationally, and specifically in Canada). Furthermore, they seek to explore alternatives to the dominant innovation system to see if, where, and how treatments can be developed to address patients needs rather than for primarily financial gain. These objectives are interdisciplinary, collaborative, and application oriented in nature.

In their current work in the “Enabling technologies that facilitate socially responsible immunotherapies: Exploring sustainable innovation” the objective is to advance the development of “Off-the-shelf" universal immunotherapies. The collaborative and interdisciplinary group seeks to do this through the research that combines advanced computational systems biology (gene-regulatory networks) with innovation studies (that the Douglas group leads) into dynamics that explore factors that impact translation into clinical practice.

Team