INTERREGIONAL COORDINATION FOR A FAST AND DEEP UPTAKE OF PERSONALISED HEALTH

Project Information

REGIONS4PERMED

Grant agreement ID: 825812

DOI

10.3030/825812

Project closed

EC signature date 19 October 2018

Start date 1 November 2018

End date 30 April 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Health, demographic change and well-being

Total cost

€ 1 720 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 677 500,00

Coordinated by

FONDAZIONE TOSCANA LIFE SCIENCES
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - REGIONS4PERMED (INTERREGIONAL COORDINATION FOR A FAST AND DEEP UPTAKE OF PERSONALISED HEALTH)

Reporting period: 2021-11-01 to 2023-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Personalised Medicine (PM) and Personalised healthcare (PHC) represent a paradigm shift away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the treatment and care of patients with a particular condition, to one which uses emergent approaches in particular technological areas such as diagnostic tests, functional genomic technologies, molecular pathways, to better manage patients’ health and to target therapies.

Nowadays the main challenge for all the players, and particularly for national and regional authorities is to enable the transformation from a REACTIVE healthcare system (based on episodic and acute care model) to a PREVENTIVE (stratifying at-risk individuals and ensure that preventive action is taken to intervene well before the onset of symptoms, let alone illness) PREDICTIVE (leverage and integrate cutting-edge technologies to not only stratify risk, but even predict risk and intervene even further upstream) and PATIENT-CENTRED system. In the face of this potential huge leap forward, the fact that personalised medicine and healthcare lack the cooperation and coordination needed to organise and connect very diverse PM initiatives and systems in Europe is a severe drawback to its development, to the elaboration of effective health policies and to the placement of investments in an effective manner.

For this reason, it is crucial to direct major efforts towards coordinating and aligning relevant stakeholders in personalised medicine and healthcare action across Europe and beyond; create a participatory approach; build trust; enable a multi-stakeholder process; channel investments towards PM.

All this considered, Regions4PerMed has created a link between personalised medicine and healthcare and regional policies and innovation programmes in order to accelerate the deployment of PM to citizens and patients. The project has reinforced the cooperation between Member States and regional authorities, creating a central bulk of common principles about Personalised Medicine and Healthcare, increasing the synergies between H2020 and ESIF on these aspects; Strengthening industrial specialisation areas in Europe and allow PM to flourish as an Emerging Industry; Enable interregional joint investment on PM and PHC, including a stable link with Vanguard Initiative and with the European Innovation Council.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the whole duration of the project we have carried out a three-level action:
1. Develop all the tasks and deliverables included in the project plan and achieve the expected results of the Action. Where weaknesses have emerged the consortium has rapidly adopted countermeasures to avoid any negative consequences on the project. Where possible, additional activities have been devised and implemented (in full accordance with the GA and the PO)
2. Establish and disseminate a minimum set of Personalised Medicine (PM) principles that are shared and agreed upon by European regions around which it will be easier to establish collaborations. This has led the project consortium to be more focused on the publication ion peer reviewed journals.
3. Engage and involve stakeholders at European, national and regional level. Increase the collaboration with the IC-PerMed secretariat and within the IC-PerMed family (elaboration of the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda on PM as well as participation in the EP-PerMed project proposal).

As the topic of PM is rapidly changing and the pace of new knowledge and discoveries is high, we have established a continuous and intense communication with the members of our Advisory Board in order to update the content of our activities and events. We have given high priority to the scientific soundness of the content we have developed through the validation of the Advisory Board as well as through the submission of scientific articles in peer reviewed journals. For the 3rd, 4th and 5th Pillar we have also created ad-hoc group of experts to complement the expertise present in the Advisory Board on a specific theme (Market Access regulation for the KA3, Innovative Procurement for KA4, ethical and legal aspect in the KA5).
We considered necessary to contain the conceptual dispersion of Personalised Medicine that too often is perceived in terms far from the scientific debate and might slow down and jeopardize the coordination and cross-collaboration at European level. On the other side, some clarification about terms such as “Regions” have been carried out from the policy and statistical point of view.
During the RP2 and RP3, additional activities to engage regional authorities through specific high level events have been organized.
Lastly, we decided to build an ad-hoc call for best Practices, to peer review all the BPs and award the most advanced ones and publish them on a specialized journal of PM (EPMA journal -IF8.836). the award ceremony was held in Brussels during the final conference.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The most important impact of Regions4PerMed is strengthen links between European regions setting up personalised medicine and healthcare approaches. This has been achieved by ensuring a dialogue between scientific and policy maker communities around the 5 different thematic (intervention) areas, the adoption of the Final action Plan.
For each of the 5 Key thematic areas of the project, a full report of the Technical and political debates have been be compiled and published. The report also contained a list of best practices which can be adopted at regional level and key recommendations to accelerate Personalised Medicine uptake.
Stakeholders relevant to PM and PHC in each European region have come together in the frame of Regions4PerMed to exchange best practices as well as highlight the key challenges ahead. The continuous technical dialogue (preparatory papers, thematic workshops, in-situ visits) has ensured that policy makers received the best possible context-related information to allow the development of effective policies and investments within their territories and communities. Regional representatives have been able to:
• Interact with the EU and global Key Opinion Leaders in the field;
• Understand how other EU regions are tackling same challenges;
• Share views and update policies;
• Interact with each other relevant initiatives at European level;
• Identify Strategic investment areas in Personalised Medicine.

The scientific validity of all the project outcomes has been ensured by the support of the project Advisory Board and by the creation of ad-ho experts groups (KA3, KA4 and KA5) where additional expertise were deemed necessary. Also, the publication of scientific paper in peer reviewed journals has been higher than expected.
Overall, the project has resulted a coherent and science-based approach for decision and policy makers. Actual policy recommendations have been approved and released. The engagement with the Regional policy makers has followed a combination of bottom up and top down approach. The inclusion of Regions4PerMed partners and regional aspects in the EP-PerMed project proposal (currently under evaluation of the EC), as well as the inclusion of many EU region in the EP-PerMed consortium, frames the success of the Regions4PerMed in achieving all the expected impacts and pave the way to great investments in PM in the coming years.

Project official Logo