Abstract

In 2012 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the commercial use of an antiretroviral drug to prevent HIV through a method known as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, or “PrEP” for short. This drug is marketed by Gilead Sciences and sold under the brand name Truvada. In the following years, regulatory agencies and global health organizations have supported the scale-up of Truvada for PrEP in several countries around the world.

PrEP is an innovation in the sense that it involves the novel use of a biomedical technology, which was produced through the experimental processes of pharmaceutical R&D and brought to market to prevent HIV. At the same time, however, PrEP emerges from a long history of public interventions into the intimate lives of individuals ‘at risk’ for acquiring this virus. Thus, PrEP also offers a novel approach to the management of intimacy itself.

In this talk, I bring together these two related histories. First, I show how PrEP has been “co-produced” (Jasanoff 1995) at the intersection of innovation and intimacy. Second, and more provocatively, I argue PrEP offers an example of the ways intimacy “overdetermines” (Althusser 1965) innovation. Indeed, intimacy pushed the pill through the R&D pipeline, and intimacy is now fueling uptake of the intervention by populations around the world. Thus, I argue this novel method to prevent HIV is “intimate” through and through.

About the Speaker

Ryan Whitacre is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Institute. His research focuses on the science, ethics and economics of global health. His current work examines the role of finance in R&D and scale-up for medicines to treat and prevent AMR, Ebola, and HIV.

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