Connect with us

EU

#EAPM: MEPs urge Commission to ramp up Big Data initiatives in health care

SHARE:

Published

on

We use your sign-up to provide content in ways you've consented to and to improve our understanding of you. You can unsubscribe at any time.

A group of members of the European Parliament have written to two European Commissioners urging them to adopt two initiatives they believe are necessary to further the cause of personalised, targeted medicine for the benefit of EU citizens, writes European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) Executive Director Denis Horgan.

The MEPs, who have been, and remain, firm supporters of the Brussels-based European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM), are Marian Harkin, Lambert van Nistelrooij, Cristian-Silviu Busoi, Adina-Ioana Valean, Elisabetta Gardini, and Alojz Peterle.

They have written to Andrus Ansip, the commissioner for the digital single market, and Vytenis Andriukaitis, who has the health and food safety portfolio, calling for the setting up of a new, pan-European task force on health data and the undertaking of a million genome flagship initiative as a coordinated effort across European countries.

The latter would be called MEGA - which stands for Million European Genomes Alliance - and the MEPs sate that such an initiative would be a realisation of the aims expressed in Article 32 of the Luxembourg EU Presidency’s landmark Council Conclusions on personalised medicine.

That highlighted a need to “encourage dialogue with member states’ authorities and stakeholders to facilitate step-by-step implementation of the public health genomics approach both at European Union and national level…and facilitate ongoing initiatives”.

While congratulating the European Commission on its recently announced task force to take health and digital policies further, the MEPs state that, with rising healthcare costs and individual health systems being increasingly challenged, genomics has the potential to provide diagnostic, economic and efficiency benefits, “ensuring that patients receive the right information and the right treatment at the right time”.

Advertisement

The letter reminds the commissioners that several large-scale genome initiatives have occurred in recent years (the 100,000 Genomes Project in the UK, for example) but that a much broader Europe-wide effort would have “an immeasurable benefit” in terms of the health EU citizens, now and in the future.

The authors state that Big Data in healthcare is here and here to stay. But the key challenge, they say, is using new data superhighways to put patients at the heart of the genetic revolution.

The task force and the MEGA project are just two of various initiatives that EAPM and the STEPs Group of MEPs are working on. STEPs is the acronym for Specialised Treatment for Europe’s Patients, set up by EAPM to ensure continued engagement with parliament.

A further Alliance initiative is a White Paper on lung-cancer screening, which will be launched on 15 May at a high-level event in Milan. This forum follows in the wake of EAPM’s successful fifth presidency conference held recently in Brussels, and is entitled 'Innovation, Guidelines and Screening: The Case of Lung Cancer - Can Italy lead the way?'

The earlier Alliance conference took a close look at lung-cancer screening from a multi-stakeholder point of view, with speakers drawn from all across Europe. It also focused on many of the other issues that affect personalised medicine today. The Milan event on the 15th will perform a similar task, but at national level.

Multi-stakeholders attending will include patients, healthcare professionals, researchers and economists.

The Alliance’s presence in Italy is an example of the multi-stakeholder group following up on its stated commitment to help to bring alignment between EU activities and the national levels, as well as between member states.

This is an EAPM policy and priority that exemplifies its SMART Outreach approach. SMART stands for Smaller Member states And Regions Together and has seen the Alliance hold high-level meetings in several EU countries, as well as helping to launch ‘local’ personalised medicine alliances (including in Italy).

Later in the year, EAPM will hold a pan-European, multi-disciplinary Congress specific to the fast-moving field of personalised medicine. It will take place from 27-30 November.

Entitled ‘Personalising Your Health: A Global Imperative!’, it will be held in partnership with Queen’s University Belfast and Visit Belfast.

EAPM believes that Europe needs to build better healthcare systems for its 500 million citizens. “If we build it, they will come”. The ‘they’ in this context are multi-stakeholders in this brave new world of genetics, imaging, cutting-edge IVDs and more.

The plan is to create a better healthcare future for all Europeans through shared decision making and co-operation.

A key aim of the Congress is to allow cross-fertilization between the different disease and policy areas, allowing delegates to gain a greater depth of knowledge into barriers in the field of personalised medicine.

It is also geared towards offering up valuable evidence and stakeholder opinion on which policy makers can base their decision making on how better to integrate personalised medicine into the EU’s health-care services.

The event at the Belfast Waterfront venue will provide the biggest ‘space’ to date to allow for such a meeting of minds and expertise, as EAPM aims to build a one-stop-shop for top-level discussion and the formulation of real action plans.

More information is available here.

Share this article:

EU Reporter publishes articles from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these articles are not necessarily those of EU Reporter.

Trending