Rupturing the Temporality of Pharmaceutical Patents: A Sketch for a New Temporal Economy of Pharmaceutical Markets

The objective of this paper is to devise a set of principles and practices that can break with the temporalities of current pharmaceutical markets, and on this basis sketch a social contract for a new (temporal) political economy of pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical futures are, in my analysis, doubly predetermined by standard arguments around pharmaceutical patenting and pricing: they are narrated as a consequence of "past" investments to be recouped, but they are also predetermined on a particular "future perfect," where past investment successes and promises to maintain the status quo determine the course of action of future investors. This double colonization of the future, in my analysis, eliminates any scope for meaningful change. Making this often implicit temporality of pharmaceutical markets explicit may allow to better take into account multiple temporalities in regulating this space. Chiefly among them are patients' temporalities, which typically get overridden by the peculiar timelines of patent-based markets. The mRNA vaccine market serves as an illustration of the theoretical arguments raised, and I discuss four strategies that could lead toward a new temporal political economy of pharmaceutical markets: temporally sensitive policymaking; decolonizing the future through narrower patents; delinking patents from their asset condition; and pharmaceutical commons.