Key Actors Of The Global Biomedical Agenda And Its Influence On Argentina’s CONICET

FEDERICO TESTONI; MERCEDES GARCÍA CARRILLO; MARC-ANDRÉ GAGNON; CECILIA RIKAP; MATÍAS BLAUSTEIN

Congreso; 7th International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology; 2023

BackgroundConflicts of interest in biomedical research can influence research results and driveresearch agendas away from public health priorities. We found two shortfalls inprevious studies about this: they only account for direct connections betweenacademic institutions and firms, and they are based on researchers’ personal beliefs.Our investigaation’s goal is to quantitatively analyze the key actors and contents ofthe prevailing health and biomedical sciences (HBMS) research agenda, and howthey influence research in non-core countries like Argentina.MethodsAs a first step, we performed a bibliometric and lexical analysis of 95,415 globarlscientific articles published between 1999 and 2018 in the highest impact factorjournals within HBMS, using the Web of Science database and the CorText platformto proxy the HBMS global research agenda (Testoni et al., 2021). Then, weperformed the same to proxy the research agenda of Argentina’s Research Council(CONICET) as a prestigious institution from a non-core country (Carrillo et al., 2022).Both proxies were made with network maps. To determine global key actors weassigned nodes to affiliations and to determine the content of the global andCONICET research agendas we assigned nodes to prevalent multi-terms from titles,keywords and abstracts.ResultsAbout the global research agenda, we found that: (a) the HBMS research agendas oflarge private firms and leading academic institutions are intertwined, (b) Theprevailing HBMS agenda is mostly based on molecular biology, (c) studies onpathogens and biological vectors related to recent epidemics are marginal, and (d)content of the prevailing HBMS research agenda prioritizes research onpharmacological intervention over research on socio-environmental factorsinfluencing disease. And in comparisson with CONICET’s agenda, we found (e)simmilarities: terms linked to molecular biology and cancer research hegemonizeCONICET’s HBMS research agenda, whereas terms connecting HBMS researchwith socio-environmental cues are marginal; and (f) differences: CONICET's HBMSagenda shows a marginal presence of terms linked to translational medicine, whileterms associated with pathogens, plant research, agrobiotechnology, and foodindustry are more represented than in the prevailing agenda.ConclusionsPharmaceutical corporations contribute to set HBMS’s prevailing research agenda,which is mainly focused on a few diseases and research topics. This researchagenda shares topics, priorities, and methodologies with CONICET’s HBMSresearch agenda. However, CONICET's HBMS research agenda is internallyheterogeneous, appearing to be mostly driven by a combination of elements that notonly reflect academic dependency but also local economic determinants. A morebalanced research agenda, together with epistemological approaches that considersocio-environmental factors associated with disease spreading, could contribute tobeing better prepared to prevent and treat more diverse pathologies and to improveoverall health outcomes.