The Color of Precision Medicine (Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society)

Will genome-based precision medicine fix the problem of race/ethnicity-based medicine? To answer this question, Sun and Ong propose the concept of racialization of precision medicine, defined as the social processes by which racial/ethnic categories are incorporated (or not) into the development, interpretation, and implementation of precision medicine research and practice.

Drawing on interview data with physicians and scientists in the field of cancer care, this book addresses the following questions: Who are the racializers in precision medicine, how and why do they do it? Under what conditions do clinicians personalize medical treatments in the context of cancer therapies? The chapters elucidate different ways in which racialization occurs and reveal that there exists an inherent contradiction in the usage of race/ethnicity as precision medicine moves from bench to bedside. The relative resources theory is proposed to explain that whether race/ethnicity-based medicine will be replaced by genomic medicine depends on the resources available at the individual and systemic levels. Furthermore, this book expands on how racialization happens not only in pharmacogenomic drug efficacy studies, but also in drug toxicity studies and cost-effectiveness studies.

An important resource for clinicians, researchers, public health policymakers, health economists, and journalists on how to deracialize precision medicine.

Chapters 2 and 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Shirley Sun is an associate professor of sociology at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her research areas are medical sociology and sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. She is the author of “Socio-economics of Personalized Medicine in Asia” (2017, London and New York: Routledge).

Zoe Ong is a PhD candidate from the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. With an MSc in biological sciences, her research interests include cancer and genetics, digital health, health communication, and health literacy.