Moving cells to the market: an inquiry into the circulation and valuation of stem cells

Innovation in the life sciences in general and stem cell science in particular is driven by an interlinked set of market demands with regulatory arrangements. Predominant among these markets are research funding, scientific labor, research materials, clinical labor, venture capital, patenting and, last but not least, patients. In other words, biological materials and biomedical products have become key sites of capital accumulation and encapsulate huge hopes for new health therapies and economic growth. Yet very little scholarly attention has been paid to the movement of human tissues from the clinic to the market — the various steps from sampling to storage, packaging, transportation and commercialization — and the successive stages to ‘realize value’. To address this shortage, we suggest to empirically investigate stem cells not as objects in their own right, but as co-constituted with infrastructures that translate and valorize them. We develop a framework to detect multiple, potentially conflicting, notions of ‘value’ and focus on the difficulties and negotiations to objectify this multiplicity in standards of economic value (e.g. in financial terms such as price and reimbursement). Relying on prolonged ethnographic research conducted in parallel in a laboratory of gene and cell therapy at a university hospital and in a clinical stage pharmaceutical company, this presentation will empirically allow to question how, why and with what consequences stem cells circulate and gain value by following their journey from donors to the market. Informed by science and technology studies, valuation studies and the material turn in social science, our results will illuminate the mutual shaping of moving stem cells markets, medical and regulatory practices.