Business historians have long examined fluctuating cycles of expectations in new technology sectors – from railways to the Internet – often through the lens of stock market performance. In this context, this paper explores how evolving national contexts conditioned firm expectations and shaped the historical experience of the cell and gene therapies field. Across disciplines, existing research has explored the fluctuating cycle of expectations associated with new technologies as they move towards commercialisation. The hype cycle model, for example, suggested that an initial period of inflated expectations was followed by substantial disappointment, which was then followed by a more realistic assessment of the technology’s potential.
In investigating cell and gene therapies, this paper contributes to works on the business of medicine. These include scholarship on therapeutic products, from: aspirin from the late 19th century; penicillin after World War II; to the beginnings of the biotechnology industry in the United States. Research involving new technological modalities includes those on recombinant DNA drugs and monoclonal antibodies. While existing work has also observed periods of excitement followed by disappointment, few have focussed on the role that local contexts play in differentiating these cycles.
This research shows that patterns of expectations can vary considerably across settings and shape dissonant industry trajectories. It does so through the cell and gene therapy sectors in the United States, Britain and Japan. All three locations -- while somewhat varied -- experienced growing expectations from the 1980s, followed by clinical disasters in the late1990s that led to significant disappointment. Yet subsequent paths diverged, as the United States and Britain experienced recovery by the mid 2010s, while similar trends were absent in Japan. The paper is based on a combination of company documents and oral interviews.