Stratification and biomedicine: How philosophy stems from medicine and biotechnology

Recent advances in molecular biology and biotechnology are drastically changing our perceptions of disease, diagnosis, and therapy. In this reshaping of medical activities, molecular and personalised medicine, with their biotech tools, are emerging as an indispensable bridge between basic research in molecular biology and clinical practice. As usually happens in the history of science, also this innovative turn in medicine has begun spurring new philosophical analyses. In the chapter we will focus on classification, or, more precisely, on stratification of diseases, therapies and patients and on what such a stratification implies from the philosophical point of view. We will start describing the topic of stratification, its novelties and its impact on the way of treating patients in clinical contexts. Then we will move to show how such a stratification turn has relevant philosophical implications. In particular, we will show how it is changing our way of defining and classifying diseases. This is an ontological topic strictly linked with the so-called bio-ontologies, which are a computational approach by means of which we integrate data coming from different sources (in our case, the labs and the clinic).