Domain-topic models with chained dimensions: Charting an emergent domain of a major oncology conference.

This paper presents a contribution to the study of bibliographic corpora through science mapping. From a graph representation of documents and their textual dimension, stochastic block models can provide a simultaneous clustering of documents and words that we call a domain-topic model. Previous work investigated the resulting topics, or word clusters, while ours focuses on the study of the document clusters we call domains.

Genomic expertise in action: molecular tumour boards and decision-making in precision oncology.

The recent development of cancer precision medicine is associated with the emergence of 'molecular tumour boards' (MTBs). Attended by a heterogenous set of practitioners, MTBs link genomic platforms to clinical practices by establishing 'actionable' connections between drugs and molecular alterations. Their activities rely on a number of evidential resources - for example databases, clinical trial results, basic knowledge about mutations and pathways - that need to be associated with the clinical trajectory of individual patients.

Multi-polar scripts: Techno-regulatory environments and the rise of precision oncology diagnostic tests.

The paper examines the development and marketing of five multi-gene tests, a.k.a.

[The emergence and development of gene expression profiling: a key component of the 3B (bench, bedside, bytes) in translational research].

This paper examines the emergence and development of one of the key components of genomics, namely gene expression profiling. It does so by resorting to computer-based methods to analyze and visualize networks of scientific publications. Our results show the central role played by oncology in this domain, insofar as the initial proof-of-principle articles based on a plant model organism have quickly led to the demonstration of the value of these techniques in blood cancers and to applications in the field of solid tumors, and in particular breast cancer.

Cancer clinical trials in the era of genomic signatures: biomedical innovation, clinical utility, and regulatory-scientific hybrids.

The paper examines two large-scale, North American and European clinical trials designed to validate two commercially available genomic tumor signatures that predict a patient's risk of breast cancer recurrence and response to chemotherapy. The paper builds on empirical evidence from the two trials to explore the emergence of diverse regulatory-scientific hybrids; that is, the paper discusses configurations of genomic practice and bioclinical work that depend on linkages between technical, commercial, patient, clinical, and legal interests and institutions. The development of the genomic signatures for each trial--Oncotype DX and MammaPrint--has followed quite different routes.

Regulating diagnosis in post-genomic medicine: re-aligning clinical judgment?

In recent years, genomic technologies have entered oncology. In particular, so-called tumor signatures are now commercially available for diagnosing breast cancer. These new diagnostic tools have expanded the content and meaning of diagnosis, by adding a distinctive prognostic (will the disease recur?) and predictive (how will the disease react to treatment?) dimension to this activity, and modifying the relations between diagnosis and therapy.

BRCA patients and clinical collectives: new configurations of action in cancer genetics practices.

Since the late 1980s, in France and in a number of other countries, cancer genetics testing has become a clinical reality, particularly for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. BRCA tests allowing for the assessment of an increased cancer risk among patients and their healthy relatives are now being routinely performed as part of clinical practice. Based on fieldwork on French clinical cancer genetics and on the French Cancer Genetics Collaborative Network, this paper examines the configuration of entities, actors and activities mobilized by the performance of BRAC testing, and argues that the development of clinical molecular genetic practices is predicated upon the development of new forms of collaborative work that lead to a transformation of the content and organization of medical activities and judgements.

[The supply of breast/ovarian cancer genetic susceptibility tests in France].

One example of the recent advances of scientific research on the human genome is the identification of two susceptibility genes to breast/ovarian cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2, making possible the introduction in medical practices of genetic testing to detect patients with an increased risk of developing such cancers. In this context of diffusion, two surveys were carried out to appraise the activity profiles in 1998 and in 2001 of all the different participants in those new medical practices in France, physicians in charge of genetic counselling, medical centres where consultations take place and laboratories. Results show that over the period 1998-2001, few changes occurred, mainly the reduction of the average waiting time to get the result of a genetic test, the increase in the annual number of BRCA2 families identified to a level similar to the one of BRCA1 and the automation of the biological analyses without noting a considerable increase in the annual output of laboratories till 2001 however.