Translations in Biobanking: Socio-Material Networks in Health Data Business

Abstract

This study examines commercialization in the context of biomedical R&D, biobanking and personalized medicine as a manifold and transformative texture of socio-material relations in which an innovation—or even a prospect of innovation—is conjoined with and put to the test by multiple human and non-human actors. The empirical study of a Finnish biobank foregrounds the interplay between social and material elements in innovative business. Our analysis unfolds the commercialization of biobank activities as a series of transformations in relations between social, technical and material biobank actors. The study enriches the theorization of commercialization of innovation by addressing the dynamic and malleable nature of socio-material relations as the groundwork of innovation business and by showing how innovation and business become entangled through translations.