Organizing precision oncology: introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This Special Issue (SI) on “Organizing precision oncology” features a number of articles initially presented at an International Workshop on “Organizational and epistemic innovation in precision cancer medicine” that took place in November 2018 in Paris. The Workshop was convened to mark the conclusion of a project supported by the French National Cancer Institute (INCa), entitled “Targets and trials: A sociological investigation of personalized cancer medicine in action (PERSONA).” The papers included in the SI have been revised and updated to reflect developments in the two years since the workshop was held. As hinted by the title of the Workshop, they investigate the implementation of precision oncology by focusing on the nexus between organizing and experimenting. The SI thus includes contributions that interface Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Organization Studies to analyze how clinicians and researchers deploy genomic platforms (Cambrosio et al. 2018) and the socio-technical and organizational arrangements that act as a condition of possibility for the performance of this new kind of clinical medicine. According to the 2020 Annual Report of the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC; http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org) – an “international, multistakeholder, non-profit organization” for promoting the eponymous domain – the number of individualized medicines on the US market grew by 116% during the previous four years, and more than 75,000 genetic tests are available. In oncology, 61% of clinical trials now incorporate biomarkers compared to just 18% in 2000. In 2020, the FDA approved 27 precision oncology drugs, including 10 new molecular entities (NMEs) and 17 new indications of previously approved drugs, a 35% increase compared to the previous year (Staff Reporter 2021). These data point to a shift from the traditional focus on a tumor’s tissue of origin to the genetic basis of the disease, as highlighted, for instance, by the New Genetics and Society, 2021 Vol. 40, No. 1, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/14636778.2021.1883501