Precision medicine and the reconfiguration of clinical practice and patienthood

Sarah Wadmann, Amalie Martinus Hauge, Anna Brueckner Johansen and Laura Emdal Navne

Chapter 30 in Handbook of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology Studies, 2026, pp 489-507 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: While massive private and public investments have been channelled into high-profile genomic research, the vast resources required locally to implement the resulting diagnostic and therapeutic products are often overlooked. Precision medicine challenges existing conceptions of disease, demands new ways of organizing clinical work, and comes with vexing dilemmas of priority setting. Further, to foster innovation and provide highly specialized care to select patients, clinical practices become increasingly experimental, casting patients as research subjects. Drawing on contemporary social science research, this chapter examines the frictions arising between the lofty promises of precision medicine to offer safer, cheaper, and more effective treatments, and the actual clinical practices of precision medicine. The chapter begins with an introduction to precision medicine before it outlines topical conversations on how this development might reconfigure clinical work and patienthood. The chapter ends with a discussion of pressing issues of global inequalities in access to the technologies of precision medicine. In particular, we discuss the representational dilemma built into precision medicine as initiatives vacillate between bioethical attempts to protect minority groups from exploitation and the risk of underrepresenting the very same groups in genetic research.

Keywords: Advanced therapy medicinal product; ATMP; Clinical work; Co-production; Experimenting organizations; Patienthood; Precision medicine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035338443
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