Focus group tackles better outcomes for EU cancer patients

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

The Brussels-based European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) has published a series of articles in an international online health magazine as part of the work of its EU Consensus Group on Clinical Trials.

The articles have appeared in a special edition of Public Health Genomics under the title Getting Personal: The Future of Medicine and Clinical Trials.

This is the first stage of the multi-stakeholder team’s activity and their articles attempt to address whether a personalised medicine-enabled clinical research and trial strategy can produce better outcomes for cancer patients across Europe’s 28 member states.

The second stage of their activity will be prioritizing the challenges and proposing workable solutions.

More than 1.75 million citizens die from cancer every year in the EU, and Europe’s ageing population will significantly increases the incidence of cancer over the next two decades.

The authors have stated that: “Now is the time to deliver focused solutions that will improve outcomes for cancer patients in Europe.”

An important part of the work undertaken by EAPM concerns clinical trials and patient access to them. Indeed, one of the four-year-old Alliance’s main aims is tackling the broader issues of personalised medicine in terms of clinical trials, as well as biobanks, data sharing, EU regulations and more, while looking towards the EU’s Horizon 2020 initiative.

Clinical trials are vital to patients and the advancement of cures for a multitude of diseases, but the issues surrounding countrywide and, even more so, pan-European trials and their application in modern-day medicine are complex.

The consensus panel was brought together in an attempt to define how personalised medicine cancer clinical trials should be organised in order to direct patients to the most appropriate research as well as addressing important unmet needs.

One crucial issue is the question of how clinical trials should best be run to maximise the effectiveness of personalised medicine initiatives which make the best provision for access for appropriate patients.

Another main aim is to determine how to structure cross-border clinical trials by enabling collaboration and minimising regulatory burdens.

And a further goal is to determine how to solve the problem of ensuring that clinical trials can be held and financed in the most efficient way possible.

From an original roundtable in Madrid, EAPM’s EU Consensus Group has since held a series of face-to-face meetings and telephone conferences in order to identify key challenges.

These involve the reality that: the cancer drug development model is no longer fit for purpose; the traditional clinical trials framework does not support a personalised medicine strategy, and; escalating costs of cancer health care undermine clinical innovation.

The panel also found that a lack of clinically validated biomarkers hampers a personalised medicine-enabled approach, and that current European legislative reform threatens clinical cancer research.

Meanwhile, they say, a lack of understanding and insufficient patient involvement undermines participation in clinical research, while an absence of cooperation between different stakeholders lessens the effectiveness of personalised medicine implementation.

The articles are available to read at the following link.

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