ABSTRACT
Lung cancer has been the most common cancer worldwide for several decades. The first important theme emerging from the interview data, ironically, is that it is not in the apparent interests of pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs that are effective for patients with specific biomarkers, particularly when these markers may be only present in a small subset of the whole patient population – such subsets can be demarcated along biomarker lines and/or race and ethnicity lines. While scholars have established and articulated the lengthy historical and political processes of racial formation in the United States, which include the creation and particular understanding of the “Asian” category, in this transnational setting, “Asian” is formulated as a geographically based concept. The interchangeability of the usage of “Asian” and “human subjects in Asia” is significant because it serves as an example of how the pharmaceutical industry is biologizing geographically based social groupings for the sake of protecting commercial interests.
