Giovanni Sanavio will present his work at the Tsing Ch’a Sessions. The seminar will be held at the Joint Research Center for Logic, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, on 24 September 2026.
Speaker: Giovanni Sanavio
Title: A Decision-Theoretic Framework for Personalized Care in Oncology
Abstract: Recent advances in the understanding of the micro-physiological mechanisms underlying carcinogenesis have increased the importance of personalized reasoning and decision-making in clinical oncology. In this rapidly evolving context, the purpose of personalized cancer medicine is to counterbalance standardization in patient care by tailoring and adapting interventions to individual clinical histories and therapeutic preferences of each patient. It is perhaps surprising, then, that models for personalized decision-analysis under limited evidence are still mostly confined to econometrics, while similarly methodologically justified approaches to integrate and evaluate evidence in clinical decision-making remain comparatively underused.
Starting from a basic template for decision-making in cancer treatment, this presentation frames and discusses some of the main methodological challenges to manage evidence and uncertainty in personalized oncology. Particular attention will be devoted to clinical decisions in which guideline-based procedures must be combined with patient-specific features emerging from multi-omic clinical records. This approach thus departs from evidence-based medicine, which tends to evaluate the effectiveness of medical interventions through fixed epistemic hierarchies privileging the use of randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses.
The proposed framework combines a substantive account of how clinical evidence is generated with the assessment of effectiveness hypotheses in rare cancers.