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.