#EAPM: Why should personalised medicine/health care be a priority for the European Parliament?

There is much talk about the emerging field of personalised medicine, yet there are many who are not totally clear about what it is, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

Essentially, it is a fast-moving field in the arena of health care that sees treatments and medicines tailored to a patient’s genes, as well as his or her environment and lifestyle.

It aims to give the right treatment to the right patient at the right time, and can also work in a preventative sense.

Ideally, the patient is at the centre of his or her own health-care decision making in concert with well-trained professionals who can communicate effectively.

It also strives to empower patients and keep them out of expensive hospitals as much as possible, and even contribute to the amount of hours they spend in the workplace.

Scientifically, personalised medicine uses characterization of an individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy and, often, can determine a person’s predisposition to disease.

The latter can lead to health-care professionals giving timely and targeted prevention.

In tandem with the above, personalised medicine relates to the broader concept of patient-centred care, which takes into account that, in general, health-care systems need to better respond to patient needs.

With the development of this new form of treatment and care, individuals and health systems face new challenges, including balancing personalised medicine’s risks and benefits while also considering its ethical, financial, social and legal implications, particularly regarding pricing and reimbursement, data protection and public interest in processing personal data.

Taken as a whole, there is no doubt that a healthier Europe is a wealthier Europe and personalised medicine is already being a great contributor to this, especially in the areas of cancer and rare diseases.

‘Precision’ medicine’s cutting-edge sciences and ‘omics’ made the news in early 2015 when President Obama launched the Precision Medicine Initiative, setting aside an initial $215 million to upgrade research, clinical trials and DNA sequencing in the United States.

America had realized, as has Europe, that targeted treatments are the way of the future, will save lives and will improve the quality of life for our ageing populations.

In the EU, that’s 500 million potential patients.

Technology is marching on and, as ever, is unstoppable. For example, the human genome was first sequenced less than 15 years ago and took some serious time and even-more serious money.

Today, the process takes a few hours and is relatively inexpensive, at around $1,000 a time.

The bottom line is that personalised medicine is an innovative, efficient and patient-centred alternative to the outdated, outmoded one-size-fits-all treatment model.

It also has the potential to yield a maximum return on health-care investment when implemented in a ‘smart’ manner – a strong argument for decision-makers in times of austerity.

There is, of course, a ‘value’ issue and the great value debate needs to happen soon. The European Parliament should play its part in this.

Without doubt there are key questions about the cost-effectiveness of new and even existing treatments. However, there is a solid argument that value should be defined by the ‘customer’, in this case, the individual patient and his or her family.

One-size-fits-all has been shown to be a waste of money in a lot of cases, simply because it doesn’t work for a particular patient sub-group, for example. And there are often genomic issues, lifestyle issues and access issues when it comes to patients, their diseases and their treatments.

There is no denying that implementing personalised medicine into Europe’s health-care systems still has plenty of barriers. In Europe today, there are often circumstances in which some patients receive better care than others. This goes against one of the foundations of the EU - the best available healthcare for all citizens regardless of location and financial status.

Legislation is sometimes part of the problem. Much is quite simply behind the times and can act as a red traffic light to innovation and progress.

It is very clear that emerging and fast-developing technologies (such as genome sequencing) have facilitated human ingenuity and added to vital knowledge dissemination (often to the great benefit of medical research, for example).

Europe cannot afford to kill off the positive knock-on effects of innovation. And if such innovation is disruptive and leads to ‘paradigm shifts’, (such as in new models for clinical trials) then so much the better.

As noted above, modern-day patients want empowerment, and to have their illnesses and the treatment options explained  in a transparent, understandable yet non-patronising manner to allow them to become involved in shared decision-making.

There is clearly a need for much more policy engagement to further the goals of personalised medicine, which ultimately means getting politicians and others to understand its value and societal benefits.

The role of the European Parliament in shaping future policy is, and will continue to be, crucial for the health and wealth of our society.

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