#EAPM: High-level Warsaw meeting embraces personalised medicine

Last year, the European Union had two of the smaller member states as its rotating presidencies - Latvia and Luxembourg (which published landmark Council Conclusions on personalised medicine in December 2015) - and now a third smaller country, the Netherlands, is at the helm.

Europe’s health policies need to recognize and tackle the inherent health system vulnerabilities faced, specifically, by smaller countries and in the regions of the larger ones. EAPM therefore calls for adoption of its SMART approach.

Already the idea has been a great success, involving medicines bodies, national health ministers and cross-sectional stakeholders, all working with EAPM to move personalised medicine to the next.

The SMART Outreach programme aims to establish the direction required to facilitate an environment for personalised medicine at national level. This includes (but is not exclusive to):

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• Implementation of EU regulatory instruments at the national level (data protection, clinical trials and the future in-vitro diagnostics).
• Harmonization of research between member states.
• Better and common guidelines on various diseases.
• Patient empowerment and health literacy
• Genomics in the health arena.
• National Cancer Plans/biomarkers.

Many challenges remain for the EU’s smaller states, especially in the health arena, and these include – but are not exclusive to – a lack of interest by industry to place medical goods on such small markets due to high or inefficient unit costs of production, a lack of competition between providers which means high prices for medicines and medical supplies due to small volumes of consumption and, meanwhile, the administrative burden of regulation does little to help patient access and lower prices in these countries.

In essence, European health policy needs to become better attuned to the specific challenges facing the health systems in smaller states and regions.

Speakers in Warsaw included Professor Zbigniew Gaciong, chairman, Polish Association for Personalised Medicine, Professor Jacek Fijuth, chair of the Polish Society for Personalised Medicine,  Professor Janusz Siedlecki, deputy scientific director at the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology, Professor Lucjan Wyrwicz, deputy director of Undergraduate Studies and Denis Horgan, executive director, European Alliance for Personalised Medicine.

Said patient representative Szymon Chrostowski: “Our next step is to help bring about better co-ordination between countries in order to ensure that patients have their say on all matters affecting their health choices, treatment options and quality of life.  This should be regardless of which Member State they live in and which country they ate being treated in.”

Professor Jacek Fijuth said: “Essentially, in order to have the best service for all of the EU’s patients, there is, as well as more collaboration, a pressing need for more and continued investment in the area of personalised medicine.”

“With new technologies and the availability of Big Data, better communications and computer processing power, state-of-the-art IVDs with companion diagnostics, and the possibility of better education among patients and health care workers, there is a clear opportunity to deliver higher-quality health care for all, excluding absolutely no one,” the professor added.

And Zbigniew Gaciong said: “How do we start to make access to personalised medicine affordable? There are many ways and among them is further investment in research and new technologies. Meanwhile, with member state health-care systems – and disciplines within these very systems – sticking to a silo mentality and failing to collaborate, a lot of vital research information is being duplicated and remains unshared. This cannot continue.”