On September 21-23rd, 2015, the p-medicine consortium composed of 19 partner organisations from all over Europe and Japan came together for their final project meeting in Homburg/Saar, Germany.

During the meeting, the project’s final achievements were presented to representatives of the European Commission, the local government as well as interested companies, research institutions and patient/parents groups.

The project’s research resulted in a series of computer-based tools, which will help cancer patients to better understand the nature of their disease and support clinicians in finding the right treatment for the individual patient by analyzing ‘big data’ from individual patients.

In the end, these tools will help not only to facilitate the communication between doctors and patients and guide them to make decisions about the patient’s treatment together but will help researchers to detect new knowledge out of shared and joined health data combined with open access data.

Prof. Norbert Graf, coordinator of p-medicine, states in an interview: “The p-medicine project is facing the situation that even large diseases like breast cancer are divided into different subtypes. And each of these subtypes needs different treatment. To get these treatments to the correct patient, we need tools that are developed in p-medicine.”

In the meeting’s 'public session', where the results of the project were presented to around 55 participants, emphasis was on the topics of patient empowerment and the progress made with regard to addressing legal and ethical requirements related to an infrastructure in which large sets of data are shared among numerous parties.

Big data issues in general were also addressed by two keynote speakers from Japan and the US.

The public session closed with an outlook on STaRC, the Study Trial and Research Center to be found by a core team of p-medicine under the lead of Prof. Norbert Graf.

The second part of the meeting was a closed session dedicated to the evaluation of the project by the EC.

The meeting ended with a very positive assessment by the EC officer and the reviewers regarding the technical implementation of the project.

They particularly stressed the excellent leadership of this 19-partner project by p-medicine’s coordinator Prof. Norbert Graf.

The EU FP7 project p-medicine was one of a number of research projects arising from the broader VPH (Virtual Physiological Human) community.

Research in p-medicine was devoted to creating an infrastructure that would facilitate the translation from current practise to personalised and preventive medicine.

The emphasis was on formulating an open, modular framework of tools and services, so that p-medicine can be adopted gradually, including efficient secure sharing and handling of large personalized data sets and building standards-compliant tools and models.

Privacy, non-discrimination, and access policies were aligned to maximize protection of and benefit to patients.

Learn more about the p-medicine project here

Watch the video here