Personalised medicine is seen as part of a wider shift from disease-centred to person-centred healthcare, from one-size-fits-all, to individualized treatment and prevention. “To realise this shift, patients must act as active and equal partners, thus becoming co-producers of health”, said Anders Olauson, Honorary President of the European Patients' Forum, in his keynote at the Personalised Medicine conference.
Personalised medicine is a medical approach that has the potential to enable taking tailored medical decisions, practices, interventions and products to individual patients according to their predicted responses to treatment or risk of developing a disease.
The latest developments and the main challenges related to Personalised Medicine were discussed in a two-days conference organised by the European Commission in Brussels on the 1st and 2nd of June and EFA’s representative was Giuseppe De Carlo.
The use of personalised medicine promises to achieve better health outcomes, quality of life and cost-effective use of healthcare. Yet its implementation in daily healthcare is lacking and there still a long way to go before these novelties will be available to the patients and the cost, integration and contribution to cost-effectiveness of healthcare is unexplored.
The first day discussions were focused on the need to improve knowledge and understanding of Personalised Medicine, to encourage public engagement, and to provide evidence that Personalised Medicine will benefit patients and society, as well as the importance of exploiting the potential of big data and ICT solutions for improving disease stratification and enabling disease self-management, while ensuring data security, ownership and privacy. The main issue identified is how to translate knowledge into clinical research: In order for personalised medicine to reach its anticipated impact on human health and wellbeing, the collaboration and communication across the continuum of research is required. On the second day the debate looked into how to bring innovation to the market and how to shape sustainable healthcare.
During the conference, the European Commission launched a new initiative called the International Consortium for Personalised Medicine ("IC PerMed"), a platform to coordinate research and innovation in Europe.
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For more information on the conference, please visit the Personalised Medicine website.