Rethinking biomedicine in the age of translational research: Organisational, professional, and epistemic encounters

Abstract

In the most recent decade, translational research (TR) has played a pivotal role in the production and circulation of medical knowledge and technologies, thus redefining biomedicine's moral force, its cultural authority, and its status in society. As a major component of contemporary life sciences, TR—or more commonly, translational biomedicine—aims to transfer more quickly and effectively the findings of basic science into therapeutic interventions for patients by means of innovative organisational arrangements, research methodologies, protocols, and professional roles. This article brings together sociological research examining translational biomedicine from different perspectives to accomplish two goals. First, it offers a comprehensive introduction to the social science debate concerning the growing adoption of a TR framework in biomedicine, with a special focus on the organisational, professional, and epistemological issues. Second, the article has an operational purpose to raise questions about the main methodological repercussions for social scientists facing the investigation of TR as a complex and multi‐sited phenomenon that challenges traditional qualitative/quantitative research approaches.

Tracking biomedicalization in the media: Public discourses on health and medicine in the UK and Italy, 1984–2017

“…This is illustrated by the growing intertwinement of clinics and scientific laboratories, where the aim is to quickly introduce, in clinical routines, new diagnostics, treatments and procedures from bioengineering, molecular biology, genomics, proteomics, etc. (Crabu, 2016(Crabu, , 2018Cambrosio et al, 2018).…”

Reframing translational research as transactional research:

“…The study presented converges with and adds to this body of literature by providing an empirical account that views these boundary practices and hybridity through the analytical lens of situational analysis and employing an empirically grounded practice approach. Crabu offers a thorough meta-analysis of sociological research examining translational medicine and finds that empirical work has mainly focussed on laboratories and crossovers between the laboratory and the clinic (Crabu, 2018). The paper thus also adds to empirical hospital-based studies of translational research, since few STS studies take hospital-based clinician-scientists as the starting point for examining translational medicine (Rabeharisoa and Bourret, 2009).…”

Past-futures in experimental care: breast cancer and HIV medicine

“…Our purpose is to suggest that hopes and uncertainties produced by experimental breast cancer medicine and its markets (Dumit 2012;Gabe et al 2012;Cohrs et al 2014) are illuminated by reference to a history of HIV services. We focus on clinical research priorities within paradigms of translational medicinethrough which clinicians, researchers, patients, hospitals, bioinformatics and bioengineers, biotechnology companies, and regulators cooperate and compete to shape the "normal" and the "pathological" (Mittra and Milne 2013;Crabu 2018).…”