Between Personalized and Racialized Precision Medicine: A Relative Resources Perspective

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 4. Cultural Authority of Medicine

Abstract

In accordance with the Precision Medicine Initiative, the US National Library of Medicine (2018) defines precision medicine (PM) as “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that take into account each individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle. This approach will allow doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatments and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people.” PM is made possible by the advancement of biomedical technology, which allows genome sequencing to become cheaper and faster. Since the completion of the first human genome sequencing project in 2003, the potential for incorporating genomics into clinical practice in the pursuit of more precise medicine has garnered a great amount of attention and interest. After US President Barack Obama announced a US$215-million national Precision Medicine Initiative in January 2015, the People’s Republic of China announced its own US$9.2 billion genome-based Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) in March 2016. Despite these large investments in precision medicine, there is an on-going debate regarding whether medicine will really be “personalized” according to an individual’s unique genetic makeup or instead continue to be developed and administered in relation to racial and ethnic identity.

Drawing on interview data with 46 clinicians and clinician-scientists who are doing research or practicing precision medicine in the context of cancer treatment and prevention in the United States, Canada, and Singapore, this paper attempts to contribute to the existing debate by proposing a “relative resources” perspective, where the extent to which precision medicine will be individualized or personalized is a function of the relative availability of resources in healthcare contexts. To put it crudely, the more resources there are, the more likely precision medicine will, in practice, provide individualized medical treatments; conversely, the less resources there are, the more likely precision medicine will be racialized/ethnicized.

Author

• Shirley (Hsiao-Li) Sun, Nanyang Technological University