Personalised Medicine: the Promise, the Hype and the Pitfalls
Editors: Therese Feiler, Kezia Gaitskell, Tim Maughan, Joshua Hordern
Contributors: Tim Maughan, Kezia Gaitszell, Steve Sturdy, Rob Horne, Alastair Kent, Mark Lawler, Anna Middleton, Jonathan Montgomery, Muir Gray, Tyra Lagerberg, Viktor Dombradi, Richard Sullivan, Bishal Gyawali
Publication Date:
3rd April 2017
Special issue of
The New Bioethics
Volume: 23. Issue: 1 (April 2017)
Personalised Medicine: the promise, the hype and the pitfalls
All articles are Open Access.
Co-editors: Therese Feiler, Kezia Gaitskell, Tim Maughan, Joshua Hordern
Affiliation: University of Oxford, UK.
In engaging critically with personalised medicine and mapping pitfalls which mark its progress this project aims to stimulate conversations which deal intelligently with controversies for the sake of consensus. We aim to ask the ethical questions which will lead to the improvement of healthcare and we take an open-minded approach to finding answers to them over time. What is or should be meant by ‘personalised medicine’ is a major theme of this issue. It is a debate bound up with question of both values in the sense of ethical reflection and value in the sense of economic return. This editorial discusses and interrelates the articles of the issue under four headings: the promise and the hype of personalised medicine; the human person and the communication of risk; data sharing and participation; value, equity and power. A key intention throughout is to provoke discourse and debate, to identify aspirations which are more grounded in myth or hype than reality and to challenge them; and to identify focussed, practical questions which need further examination.
Funding details:
This project was supported by the University of Oxford Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (grant number 105605/Z/14/Z); and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number: AH/N009770/1). Tim Maughan’s research is funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research-UK. The authors gratefully acknowledge this funding and also that of the Sir Halley Stewart Trust. The views expressed within this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Sir Halley Stewart Trust.
Biographical notes:
Therese Feiler is the Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Oxford Healthcare Values Partnership in the Faculty of Theology and Religion and a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College.
Kezia Gaitskell is a specialty registrar in Histopathology, and has recently completed a DPhil at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.
Tim Maughan is the Clinical Director of the CRUK/MRC Oxford Institute for Radiation Oncology at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Consultant Clinical Oncologist at the Oxford University Hospital Foundation Trust.
Joshua Hordern is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Faculty of Theology of Religion, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. He leads the Oxford Healthcare Values Partnership (www.healthcarevalues.ox.ac.uk). Twitter: @oxfordhvp.
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