Giovanni Sanavio presented his work at the 6th Philosophy in Biology and Medicine Network Meeting in Bristol.
The meeting was held at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, on 20 and 21 July 2026.
Speaker: Giovanni Sanavio (joint work with Marina d’Amico)
Title: Managing treatment selection in oncology: the epistemic rationale of risk stratification
Abstract: Risk stratification represents an essential instrument for determining prognoses and guiding treatment selection in personalized oncology. In this field, it allows comparisons of the effectiveness of different therapeutic strategies, thereby helping to optimize resource utilization. Our contribution aims to evaluate the epistemic rationale of risk stratification in medical reasoning. We analyze risk stratification as an instance of the reference class problem – stratifying patients according to risk involves assigning them to a class of individuals sharing homogeneous relevant characteristics. We explore whether the reference class problem—which arises in diagnosis, and disease occurrence prediction—exhibits unique features in the case of treatment selection. Expanding on Wallman and Williamson’s approach, we argue that treatment selection imposes peculiar constraints on reference classes in risk stratification. The resulting model will be tested against a medical case study involving the International Metastatic DiseaseStage Classification (IMDC) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) risk models for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC).