Together, we can realise the dream of personalised medicine

By European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan

With the great leaps in science and the explosion of data over the past few years, the potential for personalised medicine to give the right treatment to the right patient at the right time is huge.

But it requires health-care systems and, of course, front-line health-care professionals, to understand what it can do and how it can do it.

We’ve all heard about misdiagnoses – and even doctors failing to spot a disease or condition – and this is often down to a lack of training in new methods and a lack of access to the relevant diagnostic tools, as these professionals may not even know they are out there and available.

A recent report from the US has even highlighted the fact that, in the case of chronic fatigue syndrome, doctors often either fail to see it or, if they do, don’t believe it is anything more than psychological.

Ouch. Imagine your doctor looking you in the eye while making it plain that he or she believes there is nothing actually wrong with you and that you are just having a bit of a whine. It happens more often than you’d think.

Sometimes patients don’t help, however. Nobody says that getting a diagnosis right first time, or all the time, is easy and the process is certainly not aided by some patients attempting to conceal health-record information from their doctor.

Meanwhile, there is certainly a knowledge gap among patients – most overestimate the benefits of medicines and treatments and fail to properly realise some of the potentially harmful effects through simple over-optimism. As well as dissatisfaction, this ultimately leads to more costs as more care becomes necessary.

On top of this, patients failing to adhere to necessary drug-taking regimes, even when paid to do so – as was shown in a recent HIV-drug taking experiment in the Bronx area of New York – hardly helps and, again, drives up costs.

There are clearly fundamental problems when it comes to medicine’s end users – patients need to help themselves and assist their doctors in helping them, while doctors need to be able to recognize conditions as well as know about the best treatments available, at the same time aiding their patient in gaining access to them after making informed choices.

Keeping up with fast-moving developments is tough on all parties and, certainly, the relevant educational necessities are not yet in place.

That’s bad enough, but there are many more issues in Europe when it comes to the provision of the best health care possible. 

With this in mind, the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine devised its ongoing STEPs campaign, which stands for Specialised Treatment for Europe’s Patients, and calls on the EU to commit to improving the education and training of health-care professionals. 

It also asks Europe’s policymakers to ensure a regulatory environment which allows early patient access to novel and efficacious personalised medicine, while increasing R&D for this area and recognizing its value.

The final two STEPs involve the EU supporting new approaches to reimbursement and HTA, that are required for patient access to personalised medicine, as well as increasing awareness and understanding of it.

These are universal issues but even more pressing in smaller member states and some regions. So, in line with two smaller countries – Latvia and Luxembourg – holding the rotating presidency in either half of 2015, the EAPM conference on 2-3 June will push the fact that health policies need to recognise and tackle the inherent health system vulnerabilities faced, specifically, by smaller countries and in the regions of the larger ones. We call this a SMART approach – Smaller Member States And Regions Together.

The Alliance is of the view that if the presidencies, the European Parliament and the Commission, as well as all other stakeholders including doctors and patients, plus researchers, academics, industry and more, work in harmony this will improve the quality of life for patients in every country in Europe. It’s a lofty goal, and difficult to achieve. But it can be done – together.

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