Based on fieldwork carried out at the Early Drug Development Service of a world-leading cancer institution, our study sheds lights on decision-making processes at the stage where decisions are made about which clinical trial to pursue and thus which experimental drugs will feed the growing pipeline of molecularly guided therapies and therapeutic strategies available to treating physicians. The paper shows how such collective decision-making practices by a translational research unit employ formal tools and ad hoc valuation strategies that interweave technical-scientific matters of concern with patient-oriented clinical ones, as part of the institutional assetization of biomedical knowledge production. In the process, decision-making practices in part define the conditions of possibility for the provision of care in what is increasingly becoming a 'clinic of variants.' They do so by reconfiguring on an evolving basis the socio-material ecosystem through which precision oncology is enacted as a rapidly evolving assemblage of patients, physicians, research and support staff, protocols, molecular markers, drugs and administrative components.
Keywords: biomedical innovation; clinical trials; decision-making; precision oncology; translational research.
© 2023 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness.