Standard Grant: Studying the Transformation of Cancer Prevention Technologies

San Francisco State University, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a research project that studies the socio-technical landscape of leading prevention technologies for cancers now known to be causally related to the human papillomavirus, HPV. The study focuses on pharmaceutical industries, the rationale embedded in markets for vaccines and DNA-testing tools, and the resulting interventions within a political and moral economy of health and illness. The results of this study will have the potential to shape conceptual frameworks in interdisciplinary science and technology studies that seek to understand the mechanisms of biomedical and public health transformations and their impacts on human health and wellbeing; they will also have the potential to shape how public health and clinical actors think about and approach cancer prevention practices through action-oriented engagement with clinical and public health audiences. By creating a feedback loop with policy-makers, clinicians, and pharmaceutical developers, the PI seeks to work toward ensuring that those engaging in the challenge of cancer prevention and especially, public health cancer disparities, engage with these findings to consider how best to reduce cancer burdens. This research project seeks to understand how the development of two sets of commercial products, HPV vaccines and HPV DNA tests, is shaping the meaning and distribution of health, risk and disease and the delivery of public health approaches to reducing cancer. It has three core objectives. First, it will document the socio-technical trajectories that constitute the transforming landscape of HPV and HPV-cancer prevention, with a focus on DNA based prevention and screening tools, HPV Vaccines and HPV Tests, and their pharmaceutical industry materials. Second, it will analyze the kinds of biological subjects and publics that are envisioned in the transforming public health landscape, and what taxonomies of clinical and public health services are imagined and realized from this vision. Finally, it will assess the opportunities and challenges to both ensure technological adoption and to impact equitable distribution of health and illness via the reduction of HPV and HPV-related cancers. The overarching goal is to contribute to the growing body of interdisciplinary research on the biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization of health and illness; it will provide important insights concerning the ways pharmaceuticals participate in shaping health care either as a public good or commodity, generating health for some while leaving others outside of potential benefits. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.