The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) pandemic has posed fresh challenges pertaining to the prevention, control and management of infectious diseases in the medical innovation landscape all over the world. Although the emergence and resurgence of communicable diseases have been serious health concerns, especially for poor regions and populations across the globe, these diseases did not receive adequate attention in medical innovations due to various political economy reasons and their confinement to limited (poor) regions. For instance, we have seen outbreaks of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in African countries, cholera in African and Asian countries, dengue haemorrhagic fever in India and other South Asian countries, Japanese encephalitis in India and Nepal, and influenza and malaria in African and South Asian countries in the recent past that perhaps did not receive sufficient attention of the vaccine, drug or medical equipment industry. Similarly, the worldwide severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002 and the Zika virus epidemic in 2016 also did not significantly change the priorities of medical innovations, which are mostly concerned with non-communicable diseases. However, the COVID 19 pandemic has exposed the lack of preparedness to emerging communicable disease problems across the world and compelled us to revisit the threat of communicable diseases in a globalised world since the infection changed the prevailing risk perceptions by crossing the binaries of rich and poor and exposing the entire humanity to infection. The COVID 19 pandemic thus poses certain questions on the epistemological base of the present organisation of medical innovation, which is built around the principles of techno-scientific capitalism and setting of priorities in medical innovation. This book attempts to discuss the mismatch between public health priorities and medical innovations which can have implications for the health of the global population in the future.

The last four decades have witnessed several path-breaking innovations in healthcare, particularly in drugs, vaccines and medical technologies. Advancements made in the research in health and life sciences across the world have played a conspicuous role in medical innovations. The proliferation of biotechnology and its associated streams of biomedicine, bioinformatics, genomics and advancements made in the field of synthetic biology have widened the scope of medical innovations to the next level.