Exploring the Role of Dedicated Online Biotechnology News Providers in the Innovation Economy

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine the role of dedicated online biotechnology news providers in disseminating and shaping stories of technological promise within the bioeconomy. In this field, communication of future-orientated claims is closely linked to a firm’s ability to attract speculative investment and so dedicated biotech news services play an important role in facilitating this interaction between technology producers and investors. Using the emerging field of regenerative medicine (RM) as a case study, the authors illustrate how coverage of RM biotechnologies and firms by these online news services acts to increase the intensity of promissory communication and how interaction between news providers can create dominant framings of particular events in which some aspects are emphasized while others are marginalized. Considered cumulatively, the authors show how these accounts ultimately present a highly linear account of technological innovation which renders the actions of multiple technoscientific actors meaningful to investors but at a cost to addressing the local contingencies of scientific research.

Keywords

expectations bioeconomy regenerative medicine media

Introduction

A growing body of work in the sociology of expectations has demonstrated how visions of the future, articulated in relation to novel technologies, are not “mere hype,” but are fundamentally generative of technoscientific projects (Van Lente 1993; Brown, Rappert, and Webster 2000; Birch 2006a; Borup et al. 2006). These visions can be considered a form of story-telling, in that they describe an imagined future, usually framed in terms of socially desirable outcomes such as more efficient processing of information, cures for serious illness, and so on, and “a means of getting there” through the development of new or improved technological capacities (Brown 2003, 6). Technosocial visions disseminate optimistic or hopeful future-orientated claims to relevant actors and groups in the attempt to persuade and enroll them into “communities of promise” and provide templates to guide and coordinate their subsequent interactions (Van Lente 1993; Borup et al. 2006). As the “ongoing” aspect of this latter function suggests, expectations are also highly temporally situated. The sets of expectations around a particular technology or research field are not static but change over time as the “career” of their subjects unfolds. For example, significant hype and pronouncements of revolutionary potential are generally associated with the early, emerging phase of novel technologies (Geels and Smit 2000; Brown and Michael 2003; Pollock and Williams 2010).

In itself, the observation that science and technology are innately future-orientated activities is not new. That investment in scientific research is predicated on the hope and expectation of realizing a desired outcome is as true of the race to develop hormone drugs in the 1930s or the “war on cancer” in the 1970s as it is for the human genome project or nanotechnology in the present. However, since the latter years of the twentieth century, technoscientific research and development has become increasingly central to national and international economic operations and has been subject to increasingly strategic management and future-orientated regimes of planning (Borup et al. 2006). The paradigm of a “knowledge-based economy,” of which the biotechnology industry is a prime example, locates innovation in commercial entities such as start-ups and university spin-out firms, which build on discoveries in (often publicly funded) basic research and seek capital, in the form of speculative investment, to transform these discoveries into commercial products and services (Cooke 2001; Birch 2006b). Hope (2009, 68) has described this economic situation as “a collapse of the future into the present,” as the value (share price) of investment-dependent companies, such as biotech firms, ceases to be a reflection of past profitability and instead becomes an estimate of a firm’s projected future profits as estimated by market analysts and other expert voices. It can be argued that, as a result of this growing future orientation and strategic management of science R&D, the intensity of competition between contemporary technoscientific expectations and the volume with which they are disseminated has intensified to a degree that marks the present environment as qualitatively different from previous eras. The contemporary biotechnology industry can be characterized by the notion of a “double promise”—where the value of intangible scientific knowledge in the present is closely intertwined with both the projected social benefits arising from new technologies and the concomitant promise of future economic growth and increasing returns on speculative capital.

Biotech products have notoriously long lead times (often estimated at ten or more years from project inception to market launch) meaning there is a considerable time span throughout which firms must seek investment based largely on the potential of their nascent technologies. Fortun has described biotechnology stocks as “story stocks”; that is

[S]tocks whose value, even more so than regular stocks, is contingent upon the kind of narrative that can be spun around them. (Fortun 2001, 143 emphasis added)

The dynamics of sociotechnical expectations are thus particularly prominent in the biotechnology industry. Promissory narratives serve not only as a means to forge initial relations between entrepreneurs and investors but as a way to mediate and sustain an ongoing (future-orientated) narrative about a firm and its prospects through the long haul of product development (Fortun 2001; Brown and Michael 2003). To understand the dynamics of expectations in biotechnology, it is thus pertinent to investigate the networks of promissory communication through which promissory narratives are disseminated.

The Role of Dedicated Online Biotechnology News Providers

Brown (2003) has already drawn attention to the importance of press releases in the networks of promissory communication. Press releases can be understood as a means by which the complex potentials of laboratory science can be translated into stories of promising investment opportunities for the investment community and other potential stakeholders. More recently, Pollock and Williams (2010) have drawn attention to the role of what they term promissory organizations. They argue that, in addition to traditional news media and the press releases of industrial actors, a range of intermediary organizations has emerged dedicated to the production, communication, and selling of technological expectations, as a business in itself. Focusing on the work of the Gartner group, a large industry analyst in the Information Technology domain, they show how these organizations can not only (re)present the state of affairs in a marketplace but also contribute to that market’s shaping. In this article, we focus on a comparatively underresearched component in the networks of promissory communication—the role of dedicated online biotechnology news providers.

In using the term “dedicated online biotechnology news providers” we refer to organizations such as Fierce Biotech (www.firecebiotech.com) and Xconomy (www.xconomy.com), which provide a large number of news articles about the biotechnology industry on a regular basis. These, and other comparable online services, explicitly position themselves as communication hubs for the “knowledge-based economy”:

Xconomy is dedicated to providing business and technology leaders with timely, insightful, close-to-the-scene information about the local personalities, companies, and technological trends that best exemplify today’s high-tech economy. Our goal is to become the authoritative voice on the exponential economy, the realm of business and innovation characterized by exponential technological growth and responsible for an increasing share of productivity and overall economic growth. (Xconomy Web site “About our mission, team and editorial ethics” accessed May 22, 2011)

For the most part, these services do not produce genuinely new stories, but rather repackage and circulate information from other sources, especially company press releases. As with press releases, much of the content of these articles translates and disseminates the future-orientated technical claims of biotech companies for a somewhat heterogeneous audience potentially including venture capital firms, wealthy “angel” investors, small investment groups and individual investors, corporations, and other stakeholders.

While there are clear distinctions between dedicated online biotech news providers and Pollock and Williams’ (2010) promissory organizations, consideration of the latter group affords a useful basis with which to compare and characterize the former type. Both organizational types are independent entities, neither technology producer nor investor, whose primary function is the dissemination of promissory technoscientific narratives about high-technology products, firms and fields. However, Pollock and Williams’ promissory organizations act in a manner comparable to Hope’s (2009) expert market analysts, actively engaging with attempts to strategically manage the knowledge economy by providing “elaborate forms of consultancy and advice that attempts to subject vendor statements about new offerings to a more systemised and formalised evaluation” (Pollock and Williams 2010, 531). Thus, organizations like the Gartner group produce expectations about expectations. Through mechanisms such as the active classification of new technology markets or the “Magic Quadrant” tool for comparing competing vendors operating within a particular market classification, these promissory organizations actively constitute new “worlds” through which their evaluation of particular future-orientated claims are made.

By contrast, the promissory work of dedicated biotechnology news providers, which do not overtly create or critically evaluate expectations, appears somewhat passive, limited to the organizational mechanisms of dissemination. However, articles from sites like Xconomy and Fierce Biotech rarely present word-for-word copies of press releases and when they do so, the material is clearly labeled as such. At a basic level then, news articles do involve some element of production in the form of editing, compiling material from multiple sources, finding and incorporating quotes, and so on. Beyond this, however, it is pertinent to consider the activities of these services as news providers as well as organizations embedded in contemporary networks of technological promise. In particular, it is relevant to consider that individual news stories contribute to a larger body of narrative work that is produced over time—an ongoing story of (a particular sphere of) human activity (Bird and Dardenne 1988). Biotechnology news is also a form of science communication, and as such is amenable to analysis in terms of its orientating effects, frames, and structural features (Nerlich, Elliott and Larson 2009). Thus our analysis will consider both the construction of individual news articles from dedicated online biotechnology news providers and the cumulative effects of the large-scale dissemination of these articles over time.

A Case Study Approach: Regenerative Medicine (RM)

While dedicated biotech news services provide coverage of a wide range of biotechnology sectors, we opted for reasons of clarity and manageability to focus our investigation on the coverage of a single biotech sector: the field of RM. In part, this was a pragmatic decision—news articles on RM were already being collected by the authors as a resource for the European Commission FP-7 funded Regenerative Medicine in Europe (REMEDiE) project. However, there are also good theoretical reasons for selecting RM as a case study.

RM, as a domain of biomedical science and industry, concerns the use of cells including stem cells, genes (via gene therapy), and bio-scaffolds to stimulate or augment the body’s capacity for self-repair.¹ As an innovative high-technology domain, RM is associated with significant hope and expectations about future improvements in health care and future revenues for the health care industry (Cooper 2006). By its own (multiple) chronologies, RM has existed as a concept since at least the early 1990s, when the term regenerative medicine itself is widely reported to have been coined (Lysaght, Jaklenec, and Deweerd 2008). RM is thus no longer a wholly novel concept struggling to gain initial purchase in the imaginations of potential stakeholders, nor yet an established domain of practice with the kind of robust identity where its continued existence (and boundaries) can be assumed as a matter of course. Accordingly, expectations about the commercial development of RM have largely moved beyond the often radically divergent visions associated with early stage technologies. There is now an established “universe” of firms developing RM products to study, all producing and trying to sustain their particular promissory narratives. In the current economic environment, where investment capital is extremely restricted compared with the capital-flush “bull markets” under which many of the biotech industries of the 1980s and 1990s developed, competition between innovative biotech firms seeking investment is intense and promissory communication is paramount (Birch 2006b; Kewell and Webster 2009). The RM sector of biotechnology has thus achieved some stability (or identity) while retaining a strong need to communicate its promise and generate capital, making it a fruitful site for the study of biotechnological expectations.

Method

News articles on RM (as defined above) were collected from a variety of dedicated online biotechnology news providers between January and December 2009. Over 220 articles were collected. The two main organizations utilized are Fierce Biotech (www.fiercebiotech.com) and Xconomy (www.xconomy.com), alongside less prolific sources such as European Biotechnology Science & Industry News (www.eurobiotechnews.eu). “EuroBiotech” News is aimed at wider audience including industry and academic scientists, but its reporting of company news still consists of very short articles similar in form and content to the output of FierceBiotech and Xconomy.

Importantly, all these sources are free to access as we were primarily interested in information that is readily available to a broad audience. In total 219 articles, dealing mainly with commercial, rather than hospital-based, aspects of RM (as identified by the authors) were selected and uploaded to the Atlas.ti software program for qualitative analysis. An initial, broad coding was applied to the data using a set of codes derived from the literature on expectations and innovation. These were:

Deals and collaboration—agreements between biotechs, universities, and so on, especially where there is comment on the (strategic) importance of these deals.

Finances and the shape of the industry—reports of business strategies and/or financial situations and views on how a company or a subfield may, or should, evolve and be organized.

Promissory futures—optimistic accounts of the potential of research, products, companies or RM subfields.

Problematic futures—accounts problematizing the future, or future-orientated claims of research, products, companies, or RM subfields.

The codes are nonexclusive to each other and our analysis was carried out with the intention that codes could overlap to allow the exploration of relationships between concepts and themes.

The next step was to develop more specific codes arising from the character of the data itself (Gibbs 2002). This second phase of coding moved away from the broader initial classifications and aimed to capture the performative character of the texts and the ways in which expectations and problematic futures were (re)presented. During this phase, the analysis was directed primarily at the material already coded under promissory and problematic futures. A second set of codes was produced, as follows:

Authoritative statement—use of authority signifiers to bolster the credibility of claims being made about a given company, product, or technological subfield.

Extrapolation—positioning of particular finding or discoveries as the justificatory basis for future-orientated claims.

Journey—understanding or portraying the development of RM through the metaphor of a journey with progress on the journey often being synonymous with scientific or commercial progress.

Pathway—a related travel metaphor, utilizing the specific notion of the “standard” development process of pharmaceuticals as a pathway from basic research, through clinical trials to market launch.

In both cases, the codes were developed by both authors working in collaboration then applied separately by each author to the data set. The separate codings were compared and refined, developing the coding in an iterative process. Additional material from articles collected in 2010 was also used to illustrate the phenomenon of “news waves” (see below). These articles were not coded using Atlas T/i, as this was not necessary for the specific piece of analysis in which they were utilized.

Data Analysis

Promissory Futures

The theme of promissory futures was the most prominent in our data set, with 170 excerpts collected under this code. Material was coded as promissory if it presented a generally hopeful or positive account of the prospects of RM. The most common form of promissory articles in our data set are short pieces recounting a news event, as in this excerpt from a story about a clinical trial of stem cells being run in the United Kingdom:

A new stem cell transplantation therapy appears to hold the promise of curing Crohn’s disease in a large percentage of patients. And the researcher in charge of a tiny clinical trial says he’s confident that the breakthrough approach can either lead to a cure or long-term remission for half of the patients treated. (Fierce Biotech, June 24, 2009)

The message of this report is clear, which is not to say it is unrefined. The promissory cast of this report is created by linking a current event, here a small clinical trial using stem cells—with a positive, health-related future—in this excerpt, a cure for Crohn’s disease. An authoritative figure (the researcher in charge of the trial) is reported as having confidence in this linkage between current event and anticipated future outcome. This technique, coded as “authoritative statements” in our data, invokes the credibility of expertise by emphasizing titles; “professor,” “doctor,” “Chief Executive Officer,” “Chief Scientific Officer,” and descriptions; “a leading analyst,” “an expert in patent law,” and so on, to support the information and opinions reported in the story.

These short promissory articles also illustrate the rhetorical technique of extrapolation in presenting future-orientated claims about RM. The extrapolation device, of which twenty-five exemplar instances were coded in our data set, essentially follows the structure given “x,” “y” is possible or even probable:

San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics, […] is reporting a major advance that will make it faster, cheaper, and potentially practical on an industrial scale to turn adult cells into stem cells that can morph into any type of cell in the human body […] The rationale is that if you can create new neurons in a lab dish that are like neurons harvested from the human brain, then that could be a very useful platform for testing new drugs designed to deter or reverse the changes associated with Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s. Further in the future, induced pluripotent stem cells that have been made to differentiate into neurons might be injected into people as regenerative treatments. (Xconomy, October 18, 2009)

Typically, an event or some sort of technical knowledge claim is presented as a fait accompli—here Fate’s technological power to generate and control “stem cells that can morph into any type of cell in the human body.” Then, a further claim follows, predicting future outcomes based on the preceding statement—the application of induced pluripotent cells, either directly as treatments to alleviate neurological disorders or, in an intermediary step, as tools for drug discovery that will in turn facilitate the development of cures for these illnesses.

As in these examples, many of these articles present the initial news event—the technical knowledge claim or research finding—as a scientific breakthrough or a “major advance.” Geesink, Prainsack, and Franklin (2008, 2) observe that:

Discovery stories render a particular point in time—the “moment” of scientific “break- through”—as the basis to build hopes and expectations for the future.

In terms of building these expectations, Brown (2003) notes that discussions of the future are inevitably linked to the metaconcept of progress. The language of “major advances” and “breakthroughs” favors a particular model of scientific progress, one in which scientific progress occurs in a linear, “stepwise” fashion as successive barriers or frontiers of knowledge are breached (Nerlich and Dingwall 2003, 411).

This conception of progress is central to understanding the way in which the promissory is presented through online biotechnology news articles. If extrapolations create a link between the present and future, the already established, recognizable metanarrative of how scientific progress is understood to occur serves as an implicit explanation of how the transition will be made from one state to the other. Specifically, the linearity of this vision of science strongly suggests that a breakthrough event is one which renders available the knowledge and competencies to reach the next “knowledge frontier,” and so, through a progression of successive advances, the desired goal can be achieved. This rhetorical form invites the reader to infer the probability, even the determinacy, of these predicted futures from the sense of forward momentum generated by the reported present. At the same time, the articles can achieve this without having to resort to the blunt language of deterministic statements—that is, articles are still phrased in terms of “if,” “could,” and “may,” instead of “will” or “must.”

Part of the strength of these short promissory pieces is that they appear so simple as to be unconstructed. If a promissory narrative is to succeed, that is, if it is to be bought into, the actors enrolled into its script must appear to be acting in accordance with their allotted roles (Brown 2003). In these accounts, divested as they are of information on the complexities of bench-side scientific research that might facilitate critical evaluation of particular promises, the story is this: scientific research is being conducted; progress is being made, and appears to be leading to anticipated, desirable outcomes. In other words, these accounts appear simple and enticing because everything appears to be operating as expected.

Problematic Futures

Pollock and Williams (2010) recognize that not all expectations are held to the same level of scrutiny, nor are all expectation producers held to the same level of responsibility for promises that fail to materialize or do not play out as initially prescribed. In their study of the Gartner group, they introduce the concept of accountability to characterize different types of expectations in terms of the levels of scrutiny to which they are subject and the degree to which Gartner actively justify the content of particular future-orientated claims. We have seen that there appears relatively little accountability in the basic promissory news stories of dedicated online biotechnology news providers. However, our biotech news providers do not only report positive expectations and hopeful events about RM biotech companies.

Clinical trial data that show RM product candidates to be ineffective or have considerable adverse effects, regulatory decisions that go against firm and investor aversion to the high-risk field of RM also form a significant part of the coverage (eighty-one examples coded):

[T]he following month, Intercytex’s stock plunged after the company revealed that its lead drug candidate Cyzact, a wound treatment, failed a late-stage trial. Since then, the group has not been able to raise capital. (Fierce Biotech, September 11, 2009)

The lack of venture capital has really slowed very promising trials from getting to patients. We are grateful for the support we have gotten; we only wish there were more large companies and venture capital firms investing. (quote from an interview with David M. Bodine, President of the American Society of Gene Therapy, Xconomy, May 27, 2009)

Does this reporting of unrealized visions and setbacks form the basis of some sort of accountability for the expectations disseminated by dedicated online biotechnology news providers?

Promissory organizations like the Gartner group defend their infrastructural knowledge claims and evaluative statements by actively defending the authority, and refuting criticisms, of the institutional tools and practices through which these claims are made and disseminated (Pollock and Williams 2010). By contrast, online biotech news services, in keeping with other news providers, position themselves as disinterested information providers. As dedicated biotech news providers do not position themselves as authors of the expectations, they are already, to a large extent, inoculated against this kind of accountability for news of disappointing results or expectations not met. Reporting these events does not appear as a failure on the part of the news providers but actually serves their self-ascribed status as providing comprehensive and balanced coverage of the industry. This is a form of reputational maintenance but does not truly equate to the kind of accountability described by Pollock and Williams (2010).

Given this, the expectations disseminated by dedicated online biotechnology news providers could be considered closest to the type of promissory work Pollock and Williams (2010, 543) term “visions let loose”:

[P]rovocative signposts drawn up about the state and future development of the industry [that are] simply “launched into the ether,” resulting in relatively short lived levels of influence.

In line with this classification, news providers certainly do not appear to “do” anything with the expectations they disseminate. Indeed their orientation toward “representing the state of affairs” in the biotech industry and its subfields also requires the reporting of “problematic futures” and can be seen to effect the short duration of influence of the same promises they disseminate. While this evaluation is valid to an extent, we do not feel it is the whole story. We have already determined that news providers do not act in the same way as Pollock and Williams’ promissory organizations. Instead, to understand the effect of dedicated online biotech news providers, it is necessary to consider the reporting of large numbers of promissory and problematic futures over time.

The Story Stock Phenomenon

The dissemination of both promissory and problematic futures by dedicated online biotech news providers, when considered over time, provides evidence of Fortun’s (2001) “story stock” effect—that is, the narratives that can be spun around particular companies (or technology platforms, for example, gene therapy, embryonic stem cells) are closely linked to the value of those particular firms or fields. In keeping with Hope’s (2009) characterization of investment-dependent companies, the value of a company, in terms of its share prices, is shown to be evaluated on the basis of its perceived future prospects rather than its past performance:

Aastrom’s shares are up on the news that the FDA has lifted a clinical hold on the company’s Phase II congestive heart failure trial. (Fierce Biotech, June 18, 2009)

Shares in UK [gene therapy] group ARK Therapeutics nosedived on Friday as investors shrank back on news that European advisors have adopted a negative opinion on its flagship brain therapy Cerepro. ( Pharma Times, December 22, 2009 )

On Monday, President Barack Obama signed an order lifting restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research […] several stem cell related companies soared Monday, including Geron (GERN), StemCells (STEM) and Advanced Cell Technology (ACTC). ( Daily Finance, March 11, 2009 )

Promissory articles present particular firms as opportunities for investment because those firms, in turn, appear to have the opportunity to make scientific progress. News of setbacks such as poor clinical trial results, financial difficulties, and so on, damages the credibility of a company’s promissory narrative by presenting accounts of progress being blocked. This in turn diminishes a company’s value as a prospect for speculative investment, reflected in its stock price. It is indeed possible to map out the fluctuations in the stock value of a company such as Geron or Advanced Cell Technology over time and relate the changing share prices to announcements of progress or difficulties facing the companies as they try to bring regenerative therapies to market. Google Finance (http://www.google.com/finance) already provides this service, although it uses Reuters and MarketWatch ² as its main source of news references. This demonstration of the “story stock” effect clearly illustrates the close intertwining of scientific and economic expectations in the contemporary biotechnology- based economy, which gives rise to the “double promise” of contemporary promissory narratives of investment in scientific research.

It would, however, be a mistake to assume a simple or deterministic relationship between news articles and the financial value of biotechnology companies. In the examples cited above and elsewhere in this article, the articles themselves report on changes in stock prices caused by (news about) various regulatory, investment, and clinical trial outcomes. These particular articles cannot therefore be themselves wholly responsible for causing this financial effect, although they can reinforce investor trends by further disseminating favorable or unfavorable news about a company. Furthermore, dedicated biotech news services such as Xconomy and Fierce Biotech operate as one component in a heterogeneous array of biotechnology news forums and services including press releases, newsgroups (e.g., yahoo.biz), blogs, local and regional business news providers, and the biotechnology sections of international news services such as Reuters or the Wall Street Journal Online. This makes it difficult in most cases, to point to a particular news article or even news provider as the source, or the cause, of a particular impact on a biotechnology firm.

The Effects of Dedicated Online Biotechnology News Providers

If the output of dedicated online biotechnology news providers cannot be said to cause specific “story stock” effects, what then can we say about their role and effects? One answer that has already been mentioned is that biotech news services increase the diffusion of news about the commercial development of RM, helping to generate a “buzz” of interest, hype and speculation around particular events. In doing so, they fuel the intensification of the expectation environment that Borup et al. (2006) recognize as one of the characteristics delineating the present era of expectations from earlier sets of future orientated claims about technoscientific research. Beyond this, we suggest two further effects of the work of dedicated online biotechnology news providers.

The first of these applies to the ability of news stories to apply a certain frame of understanding to events. In a recent example, in February 2010, Osiris Therapeutics CEO Randy Mills held a press conference presenting a positive account of early results from a trial of the company’s stem cell therapy Prochymal, in treating the phenomenon of transplant rejection known as Graft versus Host Disease (GVHD) ( LA Times, February 24, 2010 ). In response, noted critical commentator on biotechnology investments Adam Feuerstein at investment blog The Street pointed out that Prochymal had already failed to show significant clinical benefit in two previous clinical trials with GVHD patients and accused Mills of “refusing to acknowledge that his company’s only drug doesn’t work” (The Steet.com, February 24, 2010). These contrasting opinions then became a story reported on by Fierce Biotech, effectively reframing the message of both articles as a story of controversy (Fierce Biotech, February 25, 2010). This example illustrates how the very interconnectedness of dedicated online news providers to other news sources that makes it difficult to demonstrate the “story stock” effect also allows them to generate new, potentially dominant frames of understanding by repackaging existing news stories.

The interconnectedness of news media also allows for what Vasterman (2005) describes as “news waves,” where the reporting of an initial event stimulates further coverage by other news providers and creates a shared theme to the coverage being produced:

[T]he original labelling of the event […] becomes the starting point for follow-up reporting: it structures the hunt for newer news about the case in question by defining the angle of the story and the kind of sources that are needed. (Vasterman 2005, 514)

In another recent example, on July 23, 2010, Xconomy reported that articles in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News posted online earlier that day had revealed a possible forthcoming bid by French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis to acquire US biotech firm Genzyme (on which we were collecting news stories as it has significant RM assets). The Xconomy article noted that Genzyme’s stock price had risen 15 percent as “investors went into a frenzy” in response to news of the potential bid (Xconomy, July 23, 2010). Three days later a Fierce Biotech article speculated on a possible bidding war for Genzyme after the Wall Street Journal had suggested that two other “big pharma” players, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Johnson and Johnson (J&J), might be willing to compete with Sanofi to acquire the biotech (Fierce Biotech, July 26, 2010). The Fierce Biotech piece also reported comments made by “a senior GSK executive” to French newspaper La Tribune which cast doubt on the likelihood of GSK entering a bidding war. Xconomy meanwhile went one step further to develop “newer news” on the “bidding war” angle by inviting readers to submit their own valuations for Genzyme’s stock and then ran an article discussing the potential response of Genzyme’s board if Sanofi-Aventis’ buy-out offer matched the valuation derived from the readers’ poll (Xconomy, July 29, 2010).

On the 2nd of August, as the “bidding war” aspect of the story began to fade into the background, another Fierce Biotech article reported (without apparent irony) that there was still “intense speculation” about what price Sanofi would be prepared to offer for Genzyme’s shares, citing comments by financial analysts reported in Reuters and Bloomberg suggesting a general consensus that Sanofi would be looking to pay $70–$80 US per share (Fierce Biotech August 2, 2010). The same week a further Xconomy piece noted that while no official news was forthcoming from either Sanofi or Genzyme, there was still “gossip” from industry insiders to be evaluated (Xconomy, August 5, 2010). This article also noted in passing two other Genzyme related events reported that week; promising data from a clinical trial of a cholesterol-lowering drug being codeveloped by the company, and a New York Times blog piece about a patient group launching a legal challenge to a patent on one of Genzyme’s marketed biosynthetic drugs, but reported that Genzyme’s stock price remained unchanged. Genzyme was eventually acquired by Sanofi-Aventis, but what the news cycle reported here illustrates is how a particular frame—the stock value (and potential rewards for shareholders) of Genzyme—dominated coverage while other aspects, the promise of the company’s technologies, for example, were relegated to a secondary consideration at best. This final Xconomy article also illustrates how a dominant narrative trajectory—that the potential buyout is what will determine Genzyme’s future—overshadows other events that might otherwise been significant stories about Genzyme—optimistic expectations in the case of the clinical trials data and problematic concerns in the case of the patient group lawsuit.

The Pathway Model

The second effect we wish to present concerns the cumulative news output of dedicated online biotechnology news providers. Contemporary studies of media reporting and communication of science have drawn attention to the predominance of the conceptual metaphor of “science as a journey” to understand and frame scientific progress. The journey metaphor positions scientific research operating in a linear fashion with a starting point (current knowledge and expertise), a route to follow (the “doing” of science) and a goal (improved knowledge and expertise) (Nerlich and Dingwall 2003; Allyse 2009). The journey metaphor is inherently future-orientated; “traveling” the route from the current state of knowledge and expertise takes work and time, and the desired goal lies in the future. We have already seen this linear notion of scientific progress embedded in the promissory accounts of RM product development. However, as the evidence of “story stock” phenomena also illustrates the news articles in our data set report on the commercial development of RM, where the desired goal of scientific progress is not new knowledge and expertise for its own sake, but novel science-based products and services that will generate significant economic returns.

Progress is therefore more than just scientific progress, it is commercial progress too. An examination of the different types of event covered in the range biotechnology industry news articles, for example, basic research, clinical trials, regulatory decisions, deals and collaborations, and so on, gives a good idea of which events and phenomena are considered important (i.e., “newsworthy”) by the news providers (Bird and Dardenne 1988; Vasterman 2005). These events, taken together, reveal a particular account of the processes of commercial development of RM that goes beyond the details of individual stories. There is, in effect, another journey being described; from initial investment to (anticipated) launch of a new product on the market, and this too has its own preexisting route map. Specifically the range of often reported events can be related to the “standard” pathway of the drug development process as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The standard drug development pathway.

This figure represents the general schema of stages that a medicinal product must pass through to get from initial research to commercial product under most major contemporary regulatory regimes, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Specific details vary between different systems, and the stages are somewhat different for pharmaceuticals compared to medical devices, and so on, but the core schema of the drug development pathway is well known. In recent years it has been utilized, in more elaborate form, in high-level reports such as the Cooksey Report (2006) and the US FDA’s 2004 report Innovation or Stagnation: challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products, as well as in academic and industry publications (e.g., Buchanan, Jurek, and Redshaw 2007).

The fact that this pathway is organized around regulatory events clearly illustrates the strong influence of systems of governance in shaping the process of drug development. However, this influence is largely taken for granted in these accounts. What the pathway concept also does is provide a specific, linear, stepwise model through which all narratives of commercial biotechnology product development can be organized. Innovations and breakthroughs occur at the start of the pathway. Investment is needed to drive the scientific work that can lead to progression through subsequent stages of the pathway. As successive steps in the pathway are attained the promissory value of a firm increases; progress/progression indicates that a particular firm is a more opportune target for speculative investment, which in turn supports further work to get the product through the remaining stages. Conversely, each step is also a potential barrier or obstacle on the journey. Failure to successively negotiate a particular step costs a company in time, money, and reputation, which in turn reduces their appeal as an investment opportunity unless a firm’s promise can be rescued by a repositioning of expectations (cf. Kitzinger 2008).

This pathway narrative has the effect of homogenizing and standardizing stories about otherwise very different technologies. The specificities and contingencies around, for example, a possible therapy involving the genetic modification of a patient’s own blood cells extracted and reimplanted into their body, or another based on the processing of fetal cells into an “off the shelf” batch of neurons for implantation in stroke patients are reduced to two competing investment opportunities, the plausibility of whose promissory narratives can be monitored by their progression or setbacks along the journey through the regulatory pathway. These tales of progress and setbacks, investments secured and clinical trials failed, make up the metastory of the innovation economy of biotechnology that dedicated online biotechnology news providers produce. The cumulative effect of the massive output of biotech news articles of the types described here is to provide a frame to organize and make sense of the actions of a range of different actors—companies, investors, regulators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and so on. Ultimately, the story, and the promise, is not located at the level of products or firms but of a whole innovation industry whose ongoing existence and action is evidenced by the daily output of news it generates. This frame, this understanding, provides a conceptual means with which to monitor and engage with these events. In this sense, the promissory work of dedicated online biotechnology news providers can be said to be “actively engaged in constituting the reality to which it points” (Pollock and Williams 2010), and indeed may have an infrastructural effect in the manner outlined by those authors.

Conclusion

In this article, we have evaluated the role of dedicated online biotechnology news providers such as Xconomy and Fierce Biotech, important actors in the networks of promissory communication that pervade the contemporary knowledge economy of biotechnology. These organizations produce and disseminate news articles that report on research “breakthroughs,” VC investments, regulatory decisions, clinical trials, and commercial deals and collaborations in relation to biotechnology companies. The meaning of these stories is orientated through the metanarrative of a journey from initial research findings through to successful market launch of biotechnology products. Intertwining the concepts of scientific progress and commercial product development, this idea of the journey is realized in the notion of a direct, linear pathway whose major steps and events are derived from the standard regulatory processes of drug development. Each reported event can be used to position the present circumstances of a particular firm or technology in relation to this pathway, whose end point is the launch of a successful, revenue-generating product. For the vast majority of firms, their worth is thus evaluated in relation to their potential future value (rather than, for example, their past performance). These evaluations can be optimistic or pessimistic depending on whether a firm is reported to have progressed or encountered an obstacle on its journey.

Taken individually, each particular story appears to amount to little more than an unaccounted-for “vision let loose” (Pollock and Williams 2010). However, we argue that the effect of dedicated online biotech news providers needs to be understood in relation to the ongoing, cumulative narrative of the innovation economy of biotechnology in action. Accordingly, we have identified three effects of the output of dedicated online biotechnology news providers. First, the sheer volume of outputs and their positioning as information hubs for biotechnology news allows for a significant intensification of the dissemination of technoscientific expectations. If press releases reframe and present “information that might otherwise fail to be noticed or picked up in the wider world” (Brown 2003, 14), our biotech news providers multiply that effect by orders of magnitude. Second, as news media, particularly online news media with the ability to reference and link with a range of heterogeneous news sources and respond rapidly to new information, dedicated online biotechnology news providers also have the effect of generating “news waves” of buzz or hype around particular events. The framing effect of news articles, as described by Vasterman (2005), means that particular aspects or angles of a particular event can be amplified and come to define what a story is “about” while other aspects of an event, or related phenomena that might otherwise be considered newsworthy, can become marginalized.

The final and possibly most significant effect is the way in which the predominant journey metaphor presents both scientific progress and commercial development as (interlinked) linear, stepwise processes. This has the effect of collapsing the complexities and uncertainties of a range of different technologies, research activities, business models, and markets into an abstract account of firms moving up and down a pathway, progressing through subsequent steps or failing to overcome set hurdles. This simplified narrative allows the innovation economy to be understood and monitored as a set of investment opportunities of fluctuating promise, but at a cost to other kinds of understanding and information. This effect amply illustrates Birch’s (2006b) claim that the financial relations entailed by the bioeconomy create effects distinct from the details of the technology involved.

In the case of RM, it may well be that the transition from a wholly new technoscientific domain into one which has at least carved out a niche for itself is marked by a transition from early, wild, radical expectations to more conventional promise that is able to be forced into the “standard” configuration of biotechnology innovation. At the same time, it can also be considered an effect of the dominant pathway model that the genuine novelty and disruptiveness of RM has been made manageable through this accommodation within an existing standardized schema of product development. The embeddedness of a standard regulatory pathway as an organizing feature of the pathway narrative also acts to marginalize questions as to whether the existing regulatory process, designed for the evaluation of pharmaceutical drugs, is appropriate for ensuring the safety and efficacy of therapies based on novel biomaterials such as human cells and genes (Kent et al. 2006).

In this research we have tried, at least in part, to operationalize Fortun’s injunction to direct attention to “the various micropractices by which futures, with all their ineradicable contingency, are produced, valued, judged, narrated, and written” (2001, 146). The most significant aspect that is lacking in our study is evidence of how these texts are valued and judged. Pollock and Williams (2010) have themselves reported the difficulty in providing evidence of the exact influence of industrially produced promissory work. In this respect, this study can be viewed as a starting point for further investigation of the role of dedicated online biotechnology news providers as promissory intermediaries in the bioeconomy. One important question this work raises is the ways in which this disseminated information is utilized by its recipients. We suspect that it is open to contestation and recognized as contingent, but can nonetheless influence investor behavior and the ways in which the market for particular biotechnologies such as RM are understood. In this respect, a more ethnographic study of investor behavior could be an important next step in researching this domain. Finally, it must be noted that our data set has a strong Western bias, not only in terms of the geographical locations of the RM firms considered but also in that the dynamics and frames of expectations presented in this report are intended to operate primarily within a Western-orientated venture capital market. It is likely that the types of expectations and the vehicles of their performance are substantially different in other geocultural milieus, most notable Southeast Asia and China, and this represents another potentially useful avenue for further study.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Andrew Webster, Brigitte Nerlich, Sian Benyon-Jones and the editors and anonymous reviewers at ST&HV for their helpful and insightful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was enabled by the REMEDiE project, supported by the European Commission Seventh Framework Program (Grant agreement no 217180) between 2008 and 2011.

Notes

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