TY - JOUR
T1 - Informing materials
T2 - drugs as tools for exploring cancer mechanisms and pathways
AU - Vignola-Gagné, Etienne
AU - Keating, Peter
AU - Cambrosio, Alberto
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.
PY - 2017/6/1
Y1 - 2017/6/1
N2 - This paper builds on previous work that investigated anticancer drugs as ‘informed materials’, i.e., substances that undergo an informational enrichment that situates them in a dense relational web of qualifications and measurements generated by clinical experiments and clinical trials. The paper analyzes the recent transformation of anticancer drugs from ‘informed’ to ‘informing material’. Briefly put: in the post-genomic era, anti-cancer drugs have become instruments for the production of new biological, pathological, and therapeutic insights into the underlying etiology and evolution of cancer. Genomic platforms characterize individual patients’ tumors based on their mutational landscapes. As part of this new approach, drugs targeting specific mutations transcend informational enrichment to become tools for informing (and destabilizing) their targets, while also problematizing the very notion of a ‘target’. In other words, they have become tools for the exploration of cancer pathways and mechanisms. While several studies in the philosophy and history of biomedicine have called attention to the heuristic relevance and experimental use of drugs, few have investigated concrete instances of this role of drugs in clinical research.
AB - This paper builds on previous work that investigated anticancer drugs as ‘informed materials’, i.e., substances that undergo an informational enrichment that situates them in a dense relational web of qualifications and measurements generated by clinical experiments and clinical trials. The paper analyzes the recent transformation of anticancer drugs from ‘informed’ to ‘informing material’. Briefly put: in the post-genomic era, anti-cancer drugs have become instruments for the production of new biological, pathological, and therapeutic insights into the underlying etiology and evolution of cancer. Genomic platforms characterize individual patients’ tumors based on their mutational landscapes. As part of this new approach, drugs targeting specific mutations transcend informational enrichment to become tools for informing (and destabilizing) their targets, while also problematizing the very notion of a ‘target’. In other words, they have become tools for the exploration of cancer pathways and mechanisms. While several studies in the philosophy and history of biomedicine have called attention to the heuristic relevance and experimental use of drugs, few have investigated concrete instances of this role of drugs in clinical research.
KW - Anti-cancer drugs
KW - Cancer genomics
KW - Clinical research
KW - Next-generation sequencing
KW - Oncology
KW - Targeted therapies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85019389681&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s40656-017-0135-4
DO - 10.1007/s40656-017-0135-4
M3 - Article
C2 - 28523636
AN - SCOPUS:85019389681
SN - 0391-9714
VL - 39
JO - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
JF - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
IS - 2
M1 - 10
ER -