•IGOs can contribute to system transformations required by Grand Challenges.•By creating norms, these organisations may influence socio-technical regimes of innovation.•Their agency includes ...implementing instruments that establish new practices and reinforce a common vision.•In Global Health, patent pools and consortiums aim to achieve innovation and access.
This paper argues that Intergovernmental Organisations (IGOs) can play a significant role in the processes of system transformation required by Grand Challenges. The reason is their potential to influence socio-technical regimes connected to policy areas in which they have authority. Supported by mandates, moral standing and technical expertise, IGOs act in two ways: operating with high level of political support, these organisations guide priority setting and norm development through the definition of collective problems and solutions, including STI aspects, establishing a shared vision; involving public and private actors, IGOs implement and protect novel practices that reinforce the new norms, from legally binding agreements to the creation of new spaces for international collaboration. These processes are examined here in the field of global health, where outside pressure directed at the intellectual property rules in connection to access to medicines prompted the WHO to define the health challenge as a need to stimulate innovation and ensure wide access to technology at the same time. Two of the solutions implemented by IGOs to achieve both goals are analysed: the Medicines Patent Pool, designed by UNITAID to fulfil access and innovation needs in relation to HIV/AIDS drugs, and WIPO Re:Search, set up by WIPO to support collaboration and accelerate discovery and product development for Neglected Tropical Diseases, Malaria and Tuberculosis.
Animal health laboratories are an increasingly important part of safeguarding animal and public health due to their role in surveillance and diagnostics of animal diseases, food safety, and in the ...development and production of medicinal products, vaccines, and diagnostic tools. Despite their importance, the global distribution of veterinary laboratory expertise is uneven, with greater concentration of reference laboratories in wealthier countries. To address this issue, the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE) created a Laboratory Twinning Programme in 2006. The paper will briefly review this Programme in the context of an increasingly populated global health security field, based on a literature review and on a combination of public and internal WOAH data and describe the implementation of the Programme in the past 16 years, noting the drivers for project implementation, its links with the global livestock biomass distribution and with the current distribution of veterinary laboratory expertise. There has been broad uptake and diversity in the focus of the twinning projects implemented in WOAH Member Countries. The Laboratory Twinning Programme would benefit from an evaluation that looks at its outcomes and quantifiable impact in beneficiary countries. A case is made for the development of a monitoring and evaluation system tailored to the Programme's specificities.
The financial crisis can be understood in many different terms. In this article, it is analyzed in terms of the unfolding of a series of elite narratives that shaped the agenda of regulation before ...the crisis, that were damaged by the crisis, and that were then reframed and recounted again in the wake of the crisis. The form of these stories differs in subtle ways by jurisdiction, and thus the fate of postcrisis regulatory practice likewise differs.
What is the relationship between the financial system and politics? In a democratic system, what kind of control should elected governments have over the financial markets? What policies should be ...implemented to regulate them? What is the role played by different elites - financial, technocratic, and political - in the operation and regulation of the financial system? And what role should citizens, investors, and savers play? These are some of the questions addressed in this challenging analysis of the particular features of the contemporary capitalist economy in Britain, the USA, and Western Europe. The authors argue that the causes of the financial crisis lay in the bricolage and innovation in financial markets, resulting in long chains and circuits of transactions and instruments that enabled bankers to earn fees, but which did not sufficiently take into account system risk, uncertainty, and unintended consequences. In the wake of the crisis, the authors argue that social scientists, governments, and citizens need to re-engage with the political dimensions of financial markets. This book offers a controversial and accessible exploration of the disorders of our financial capitalism and its justifications. With an innovative emphasis on the economically 'undisclosed' and the political 'mystifying', it combines technical understanding of finance, cultural analysis, and al political account of interests and institutions. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199589081/toc.html
The banking crisis of 2007‐2008 briefly threatened to overturn a system of market government that had lasted for nearly three decades—a system designed to minimise democratic control over markets. ...The crisis drew politicians once more into financial politics and exposed bankers and banking institutions to popular criticism and control. But the development of regulatory debates, and of the institutions designed to manage the crisis, have combined to avert this threat to the established order. The crisis is being ‘wasted’: it is failing to produce radical reforms. The paper establishes the intellectual and institutional origins of this failure, and argues that, while the reform window is closing, it is not yet fully shut: there exists yet scope for radical argument and popular mobilisation in the creation of a financial system with fewer pathological features.
This project explores the role narratives play in helping giant corporations to achieve their political and economic goals in democratic capitalism. Using a framework in which political science and ...cultural economy insights about business representation are taken into account, it claims that stories bring arenas and actors together in a public negotiation of power. While actors' interests and beliefs are in constant evolution, it is through narratives that they legitimate their demands and decisions, creating new sets of interests and structures in the process. The substantive part of this analysis looks at a set of public interactions between corporations and different groups of external actors, both in governance arenas and in the stock market. It finds that effective stories of business representation are not structured plots with a beginning, middle and end but are rather a set of arguments developed in different directions that depend on the narratives told by other actors: in a nutshell, stories provide elements that can be combined and reassembled to intersect with other narratives. The overall conclusion is that stories have become a structural feature of public spheres.
The first phase of the crisis in Britain from the 2007 failure of Northern Rock to the post Lehman systemic crisis of autumn 2008 was a demystifying moment, when finance sector alibis, technocratic ...expertise and the assumptions of the political classes were tested and found wanting under pressure of unanticipated events. The banking rescue of 2007-8 amounted to the socialization of banking losses at a cost to the UK taxpayer of up to L1,000 billion or more (if we include contingent liabilities and exclude quantitative easing). British taxpayers got very little in return. The challenge of a brief democratic moment was met by the restatement of old pre-crisis narratives about the importance of 'flexible', market responsive regulation, and about the social value of finance. The result so far is marginalisation of left and radical forces (or no change on the past twenty-five years). Against this background, this essay has two interlinked aims. First, it presents an analysis of political obstacles to democratic control and reform of the finance sector that caused the financial crisis of 2007-8; a crisis that, after extreme intervention to save banks and support markets, has by 2010-11 become a fiscal crisis for individual states and a sovereign debt crisis for the eurozone. Second, it addresses (in this context) the role of 'ideology' within the socio-political process by examining how discourses format the world through what is now called 'performativity'. And it shows how this new kind of discursive description can be developed and integrated with more established kinds of institutional analysis so as to generate new insights into the political obstacles to reform. The argument below is illustrated with UK evidence and our aim is to provide an analysis of national peculiarities, but the issues raised are relevant to other jurisdictions (national and supra national). We hope to raise broad questions about the mechanisms of elite power in present day capitalism where the importance of narrative has intensified since Reagan and Thatcher. We also aim to encourage reflection on how narrative power could be challenged so as to deliver a more democratic reform of finance. Adapted from the source document.
Although most activating mutations of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-mutant non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) are sensitive to available EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), a subset ...with alterations in exon 20 of EGFR and HER2 are intrinsically resistant and lack an effective therapy. We used in silico, in vitro, and in vivo testing to model structural alterations induced by exon 20 mutations and to identify effective inhibitors. 3D modeling indicated alterations restricted the size of the drug-binding pocket, limiting the binding of large, rigid inhibitors. We found that poziotinib, owing to its small size and flexibility, can circumvent these steric changes and is a potent inhibitor of the most common EGFR and HER2 exon 20 mutants. Poziotinib demonstrated greater activity than approved EGFR TKIs in vitro and in patient-derived xenograft models of EGFR or HER2 exon 20 mutant NSCLC and in genetically engineered mouse models of NSCLC. In a phase 2 trial, the first 11 patients with NSCLC with EGFR exon 20 mutations receiving poziotinib had a confirmed objective response rate of 64%. These data identify poziotinib as a potent, clinically active inhibitor of EGFR and HER2 exon 20 mutations and illuminate the molecular features of TKIs that may circumvent steric changes induced by these mutations.
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