Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the practical and material configurations of the ‘person(al)’ in experimental cancer immune therapy, where immune cells from the patient’s cancer tissue are used to eliminate incurable cancers. Drawing on ethnography from Denmark, we examine personal cancer immune therapy as a carefully steered practice—a choreography—through which tissues and cells originating from the same person are reconfigured in unpredictable ways. Cancer tissue, conventionally perceived as a dangerous ‘other’, holds the potential to act as a lifesaving ‘self’ in the form of a personal cure. Conversely, T-cells, conventionally perceived as protectors of the embodied ‘self’, can act as life-threatening ‘others’, endangering the person from whom they originated. We develop the notion of ‘choreographies of nearness’ to analyse how immunological and ontological relations are enacted in the clinical and experimental practices of personal cancer immune therapies. Tracing the execution of clinical protocols in ethnographic detail, we show that this emerging medical practice involves choreographies through which tissues and cells are enacted as neither strictly self nor other, but as ‘ near ’ the embodied person from whom they derive. Unpacking the potential of the ‘near self’, we expose the laborious and high-stakes ways of doing the ‘person(al)’ in this therapy.
Source: BioSocieties
Authors: Mie S. Dam, Tone Druglitrø
Institutions: University of Copenhagen, University of Oslo
Language: English
Subfield: Physiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,990
Awards: G1728670057, G579111172
OpenAlex ID: W4416128784