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Des sources du savoir aux médicaments du futur From the sources of knowledge to the medicines of the future 1 84 Elaboration des pharmacopées Les plantes révèlent dans ces deux exemples la force de la dimen¬ sion rituelle comme adjuvant au remède physique. La matière végé-Des sources du savoir aux médicaments du futur From the sources of knowledge to the medicines of the future

This paper presents three embedded episodes in the life of a polyherbal drug indicated as a preventative measure for hangovers. Invented and marketed in 2005 by a leading ayurvedic pharmaceutical company in India, PartySmart is a reformulated compound based on ayurvedic, biomedical and phytochemical sources. This creative process has involved multiple translations, resulting in hybrid pharmacological models, including, for instance, ayurvedic post-digestive tastes and biomedical effects on enzymatic activities. These modes of therapeutic action are conceptualizations of an active drug-- i.e., a digested and metabolized drug. A problem arises, however, in the fact that the ingestion of this drug is linked to alcohol consumption in a country where it is widely considered in negative terms. For this reason, PartySmart was seen as an ambivalent presence in the firm's catalogue and thus a series of interventions aiming to uphold the image of this drug transformed both its social inscription and its materiality. This transformation also took a different, global trajectory as the drug gradually developed as a transnational pharmaceutical commodity and became a new object in new latitudes. By focusing on the social and material dimensions of this drug in these contexts, this paper calls upon science studies to expand the scope of pharmaceutical anthropology. It brings together various layers of analysis to offer new perspectives on contemporary herbal formulations as they traverse material cultures, medical epistemologies, sociopolitical borders, legal environments and social practices.

This article revisits the conceptualisation of pharmaceutical regulation. While States and multilateral organisations play a central part in devising rules, regulation as a social practice extends beyond their role. Domestic and international interests, geopolitics and spatial configurations, commercial and health considerations, governmental policies and individual behaviours and legal and illegal transactions all contribute to regulating the pharmaceutical milieu. This consideration expands the epistemological range of pharmaceutical regulation, which then appears as the assemblage of heterogeneous laws, rules and codes of conducts. The way in which these layers are connected forms what regulation actually is in practice. Regulation multiple thus appears as the product of tensions between harmonisation efforts and persistent diversity, as well as the result of interactions and overlaps between official regulation and unofficial regulatory practices. This article explores these tensions in the Southeast Asian pharmaceutical market along three themes: circuits and logistic regimes; control and attention to quality; bridges and harmonisations. The globalisaTion of pharmaceutical markets which has been taking place over the last 30 years is marked by deep transformations in the geographies of production

Asian industrial medicines have witnessed a remarkable growth in both production and consumption over the past two decades À in most regions of Asia and increasingly, around the world. This changing landscape is closely linked to the forging of new markets, which in turn influence the medicines' design, manufacturing and production, marketing, and protection as intellectual property. In the process, traditional herbal formulations have been transformed À sometimes (re)invented À giving rise to a new generation of drugs marketed for new aims, involving new users, prescribers and providers. Nevertheless, researchers in anthropology, history and Asian studies have paid scant attention to the modulations of traditional herbal formulations and the dynamics surrounding their contemporary use.Although anthropologists have studied the changing sets of ideas and regimes of value that emerge in the biography of drugs from their production to their use (Whyte, Van der Geest, and Hardon 2002), studies that follow this 'social life of medicines' approach have generally glossed over the making of medicines as material things (Pordi e, this issue). Drawing on social studies of science and technology, this special issue aims to fill this gap, showing how 'traditional' Asian medicines are made, how they are designed for use in specific segments of the (global) market, and how the efficacies of products are constructed.This volume originates from a panel at the Fifth International Conference on the Pharmaceutical Life Cycle held in Driebergen, the Netherlands, in September 2013, which gathered scholars working on China, Tibet, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and India. The contributions show in great detail how in making new 'traditional' products, manufacturers combine ingredients through processes of reformulation, purification and reverse pharmacology, creating new therapeutic indications tailored to new markets and drawing increasingly from the categories of biomedicine.The special issue takes as its point of departure a new configuration of Asian medicines that Pordi e and Gaudilli ere (2014) in a recent article named the 'reformulation regime'. This term describes contemporary manufacturing and production practices in industrializing Asian medicine as well as their central role in reshaping how traditional knowledge-based pharmaceutical innovations are regulated, appropriated and protected by law. The reformulated drugs, Pordi e and Gaudilli ere argue, constitute an alternative modernity that differs in key ways from the exclusive molecular paradigm that has dominated pharmaceutical inventions since the Second World War. By making use of plant compounds and/or phytochemical fractions, sometimes together with synthetic ingredients, this regime offers new avenues in pharmaceutical innovation as it stands at odds with the biomedical world of pharmacy, which À when it comes to the use of natural ingredients À remains centred on the bioprospection model, i.e. the mining of local resources in order to select research mater...