Personalized medicine: conference at the Lieu Unique with Arnaud Poitou

This round table will bring together Xavier Guchet, Sandra Mercier and Arnaud Poitou and will be moderated by Guillaume Durand.
Prescribing the best possible medical treatment to a patient according to his/her genetic and other characteristics, preventing the onset of disease, developing new technologies (bioprinting, gene therapy, etc.) – the hopes are high for personalized medicine, even if it is still limited to certain diseases and to a small number of patients. But it also raises many ethical, economic and social questions: How to protect the confidentiality of the genetic data collected? How will physicians react to the chance discovery of other diseases? Who will have the means to finance particularly expensive treatments? Will this medicine be fair? So many issues to discuss at this round table.


Xavier Guchet, university professor, teaches the philosophy of techniques at the University of Technology of Compiègne. Author of “La médecine personnalisée. Un essai philosophique” (Les Belles Lettres, 2016).

Sandra Mercier is a university lecturer - hospital practitioner in the medical genetics department of Nantes University Hospital.


Arnaud Poitou, university professor, is director of Centrale Nantes. He previously headed the Research Institute in Civil and Mechanical Engineering, GeM.

Guillaume Durand is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Nantes, a member of the Consultation d'éthique clinique at the University Hospital of Nantes and the Jules Verne Clinic.