Short Abstract

This panel imagines how or what a ‘better’ - more equitable, solidaristic, care-centred – personalised medicine is or should be through the lens of patient-centred care, patient engagement, responsible data governance, exclusionary tendencies of current PM models, high costs and access barriers.

Description

Personalised medicine (PM) is a multifaceted and evolving set of with data-driven approaches and practices that promise to transform healthcare by tailoring prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to individual biological profiles. It emerged from within earlier medical traditions, from histories of disease classification, public health, technological innovation, to pharmaceutical development. However, the fate of PM today as a socio-technical phenomenon is unsurprisingly shaped by technological, socio-political, and economic imperatives intrinsically tied to data, infrastructures, publics, and treatments. Routinising PM in society poses multiple challenges related to equity and access that are as linked to the exclusionary tendencies of algorithmic models, representativeness of datasets, and the calculus of cost-effectiveness, as they are on iterative dialogical engagement with patients and publics at large. The success of the latter being not only reliant on improving affordability and addressing unmet needs, but also (increasingly) capacity to build, implement and sustain solidaristic data and patient governance frameworks that recognise both individual and collective rights. This is the focus of our panel – to imagine a ‘better’ PM beyond ‘precision-ing’ techniques and technologies that envisions patient-centred care and meaningful public and patient involvement to counteract the ‘depersonalisation’ inherent in data-driven approaches to health and medicine.

We invite empirical and conceptual abstracts, papers, reflections that imagine, research, envision, how or what ‘a better PM’ - a more equitable, solidaristic, and care-centred PM – is or should be. A wide-range of related topics are welcome; from the interplay between PM and related movements such as evidence-based medicine, patient-centred care, patient engagement, high costs, access barriers, to responsible data governance and the exclusionary tendencies of current PM models.

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