The presidency conference “Life Sciences – The Era of Personalised Medicine” was held lunch to lunch on June 27-28, 2023. It attracted 289 participants of high level from industry, ministries, government agencies, patient organisations, the European Commission, EU agencies, trade organisations, academia, and the healthcare system. The Presidency of the EU Council and the interest for the topic allowed for the gathering of an extraordinary group of attendees.
The programme featured the Swedish ministers Jakob Forssmed, Minister for Social Affairs and Public Health, Acko Ankarberg Johansson, Minister for Health Care, and Mats Persson, Minister for Education and Research. Keynote speeches were delivered by Joao Monteiro, Chief Editor of Nature Medicine, and Marlene Thomas, Head of Portfolio Strategy & Enablement at Roche. The European Commission was represented in the programme by Joanna Drake, Vice Director-General of the Directorate General for Research and Innovation, Andrzej Rys, Principal Scientific Adviser, Directorate General for Health and Food Safety, and Irene Norstedt, Director of the People Directorate within the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. Spain’s Ambassador to Sweden, Cristina Latorre Sancho, participated in the concluding speech. Each day featured a break-out session with a choice between one of four break-out discussion topics and a guided tour of the thriving Hagastaden life sciences district. Finally, there were four plenary panel discussions addressing the conference focus areas with three panels consisting of representatives from industry, patient organisations, public sector and academia. For the fourth panel, the Director Generals of the four Swedish government agencies that organised the break-out discussions presented and discussed the result from those break-outs.
In the evening of the first day, the city and region of Stockholm jointly hosted a conference dinner at the Stockholm City Hall: The dinner also included a conversation between Professor Anna Wedell, member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet, and Joao Monteiro, Chief Editor of Nature Medicine.
In addition to the main programme, the conference also attracted six side events for which the organisers applied for and received the right to use the official presidency logo and that were referred to on the presidency conference web page. These were organised by the European Investment Bank (EIB), the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) and SwedenBIO, Swedish Medtech and EIT Health Scandinavia, ATMP Sweden and the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), and finally the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry (Lif).
