PREPARE - for the delivery of socially robust stem cell medicine

The PREPARE team of reNEW Copenhagen seeks to ensure socially robust stem cell treatments.

Research focus

In Copenhagen, PREPARE operates across Medical Museion – a museum and research site – and a health services research unit.

We combine public engagement with research into how stem cell information reaches the public and how treatments become embedded in health services. We study the hopes that future users of stem cell treatments hold for the work of reNEW researchers, and we explore how wider publics view and find information about stem cell research and treatments.

Furthermore, we seek to anticipate social and regulatory challenges and find ways of bringing awareness of these to the laboratory and clinical researchers.

Main research projects

The public legitimacy of stem cell science (Assistant Professor Lea Skovgaard)
In this research package, Skovgaard uses different methods to explore what affects legitimacy of stem cell research in different publics. She also studies how methods configure publics with particular traits, and thereby also contributes with knowledge about the legitimacy of stem cell research and of how methods affect both whose voices become engaged.
How patient histories shape stem cell imaginaries (Postdoc Tine Friis)
In this research package, Friis explores how participants in clinical trials imagine the future of stem cell research, focusing on the brain and Parkinson’s disease. Friis contributes to the knowledge of the formation of future imaginaries and develops methods for studying how imaginaries shape participants’ relationships with their bodies and medical regimes.
Engaging future patients: hopes, concerns and feasibility (Postdoc Anne Sofie Børsch)
In this research package, Børsch engages with patients with ulcerative colitis, stem cell researchers, and regulators to understand how anticipated regulation and therapeutic setups resonate with the lives patients live with their condition. Her work contributes new knowledge about how patients may be involved upstream in the development of stem cell therapies.
How people find information and information finds people (PhD Student Anders Grundtvig)
In this research package, Grundtvig investigates how patients engage with online stem cell information, and how online technologies mediate interactions between patients and information. His work explores how stem cell information reaches a public though; a) search engines, b) advertisement c) social media, and d) SC communication websites. His work contribute new knowledge about the socio-technical infrastructures of online stem cell information and ultimately how these infrastructures reveal and shape patient perceptions.

Publications

Collaborations

PREPARE in Copenhagen is partly based at Medical Museion. Here we engage with the public through live events, art collaborations, and other forms of communication.

We also pursue our own medical humanities and collaborative research, focusing on the cultural, social and historical contexts of stem-cell science and other aspects of contemporary biomedicine.

We also provide a platform for bringing together science and perspectives from key stakeholders (patients, clinicians, artists and others), curating unusual and memorable museum-based encounters and conversations.