Personalised medicine can build ‘a new reality’ for Europe’s patients

"Personalised medicine is not just an idea, it will be a new reality," said Professor Helmut Brand, head of the Department of International Health at Maastricht University and co-chair of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM).

Professor Brand was speaking as EAPM this week launched its ‘Five steps towards a healthier Europe’ (STEPs) campaign before a packed audience in the Brussels European Parliament.

Around 100 public health and medical students from across the EU, plus MEPs, representatives from the Greek EU Presidency and the European Commission, as well as patients, scientists and other stakeholders, heard that STEPs aims to secure patients’ quality of life through personalised medicine (PM).

The campaign will continue during the run-up to the EP elections in May and already has the backing of many cross-party MEPs.

Key messages to emerge from the event, which was held on Wednesday 19 February, were that fears about so-called big data among the public need to be allayed, more general discussion is needed at policy level and new payment models need to be brought about to allow this radical concept to fulfil its promise.

“We are working towards making PM the mainstream, towards making it a reality. As well as the other stakeholders in this room, the next generation of scientists, policymakers and patients sitting here today can play a large part in that," added Brand.

The STEPs launch included a lively Q and A session alongside expert input from EFPIA’s chief economist Richard Torbett, Angela Brand, from the Institute for Public Health Genomics, prostate cancer patient Louis Denis, Science Europe’s Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch, urologist Didier Jacqmin and Olivier Arnaud of JDRF.

These were joined on the podium by the European Commission’s Andrejz Ryz, Antonis Lanaras, Health Counsellor for the Permanent Representation of Greece to the EU, plus MEPs Marian Harkin, Vittorio Prodi and Petru Luhan.

The assembly heard that the Alliance (EAPM) initiative calls on decision-makers to commit to the following STEPs for 2014-2019:

• STEP 1: Ensuring a regulatory environment which allows early patient access to novel and efficacious PM.

• STEP 2: Increasing research and development for PM, while recognising its value.

• STEP 3: Improving the education and training of healthcare professionals.

• STEP 4: Supporting new approaches to reimbursement and HTA assessment, required for patient access to PM.

• STEP 5: Increasing awareness and understanding of PM.

EAPM believes that achieving these goals will improve the quality of life for patients in every country in Europe.

Ten facts about personalised medicine:

• Personalised medicine (PM) has already changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients and we will soon be talking about millions.
• When coupled with personal pharmacogenetics, PM is a unique approach to treatment that advocates believe is well-suited to tackle many of the health challenges we face.
• Many chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s, are thought to be caused by a combination of genetic and other factors. Such diseases place a significant burden on the healthcare system as well as the patient. PM provides the tools to treat such diseases more effectively than ever before.
• This is because PM is the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. Science can now tell us how a person’s unique molecular and genetic profile can make them susceptible to certain diseases.
• PM can then use this genetic information to prevent or treat disease in adults or their children.
• Using related science, it is now much easier to predict which medical treatments will be safe and effective for each patient, and which ones will not be.
• In this way, individually customised therapies can improve a patient's response rate to a chosen treatment, reduce the side effects, and (in certain circumstances) shorten the treatment period.
• As part of this, PM helps to determine the right dose for a patient, whilre avoiding hazards based on familial history, environmental influences, and genetic variation.
• In the case of cancer, for example, precisely co-ordinated treatment approaches are invaluable. The disease occurs in many forms, and every tumor has different biochemical and genetic preconditions. It is therefore almost impossible to develop effective, 'one-fits-all' treatments.
• PM relies upon input from a wide range of stakeholders working in (often new kinds of) collabroation. These include healthcare providers, biopharmaceutical companies, diagnostic companies, academic researchers, IT/Informatics companies, payers, regulators, legislators and, of course, patients.

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