Many think that philosophy, in a medical school, is only related to bioethics and is of no use for laboratory-based research.
However, a recent paper from BSMS shows that studying the philosophy of signs, which arose from the study of linguistics, can provide a new perspective in the interpretation of biomarkers when these are used to formulate mechanistic theories of disease and translate them to the clinic.
BSMS professors, Pietro Ghezzi, a basic research scientist, and Kevin Davies, a clinical rheumatologist, applied the theory of signs to the problem of the meaning of biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress.
The study helps explain why the cytokine theory of disease was successfully translated to the clinic, with many anti-cytokine molecules approved in the treatment of inflammatory disease, while the theory of oxidative stress has not lead to any antioxidant drug approved for any indication. The work stresses the importance of network analysis over classical statistical approaches based on significance testing, and indicates ways of defining populations of patients with multi-causal disease. This could be important in the application of “personalised medicine" and might help in patient stratification in clinical trials for several chronic diseases.
The BSMS professors worked in collaboration with Dr Aidan Delaney, Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Brighton, and Luciano Floridi, Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford. The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA here >