The European Alliance for Personalised Medicine is a multi-stakeholder platform bringing together the patient organisations, medical professional organisations, industry associations, healthcare planners and policymakers. The idea behind the Alliance is to shape an environment for personalised medicine. This is done to different activities by engaging with policymakers both at the EU level and the national level, in particular, in the areas of education for healthcare professionals, the area of big data, and the area of access and value and regulatory affairs, which covers the issues of data protection, in vitro diagnostics, clinical trials and medical adaptive pathways.
The Alliance organises presidency conferences each year. We started in Ireland in 2013 with the EU presidency conference. We just organised our conference a few weeks ago, under the Maltese presidency, focusing on lung cancer screening. On November 27th and November 30th we’re going to organise an international congress on personalised medicine. This congress will bring together 700 delegates. We have 200 speakers that have signed up to speak there and it covers six key broad areas. An overarching area is how can we bring innovation into healthcare systems. This is a big issue for Europe. Europe has all this wonderful science, it’s got a lot of educated healthcare professionals, but it has a big issue in how can we integrate this innovation to healthcare systems?
This is a key focus of the congress in Belfast. It has a cross-fertilisation of different ideas coming from different disease areas and different policymakers. We decided for the congress to be November 27th and November 30th because it takes account of all the other medical congresses that have taken place throughout the year such as the European Society of Medical Oncology Congress, the Respiratory Congress is taking place around the same time, the Haematology Congress, the Urology Congress. A key driver is how can we integrate all the wonderful science that they have developed into healthcare systems?
Another key focus is to highlight why health is important. There’s a lot of focus on new technologies, but technologies should be the servant of healthcare. So a big focus of the congress is to highlight the role of healthcare and put it as a priority for the EU. Healthcare was not a priority for the EU from 2014 to 2019, and with the upcoming EU elections in 2019 and also the commission setting forward its work program, we want healthcare to be a priority and looking at how we can integrate innovation into healthcare systems. There are 35 parallel sessions and twelve presidential sessions in the congress.
How do you handle the issue of diversity in policy between countries in the EU?
Our big issue for healthcare systems is how can we integrate innovation? Innovation is the same everywhere, but the question is different systems in different countries, there needs to be more alignment at the European level, which respects the individuality or identities at the national level or regional level, but allows a more common approach to tackle different disease areas. Europe has tried to do this in different platforms and different regulations – regulations in terms of legal regulations – but there has often been a pushback by member states in how to implement these regulations. A key area is in the clinical trials regulations and also in the data protection regulations, which gives a wide ambit for member states to implement in different ways. What the Alliance is focusing more on is focusing on guidelines and how guidelines can be a driver of innovation. This would provide flexibility for regions and member states to integrate different types of innovation, but allow a common system approach to drive innovation into healthcare systems. Education of healthcare professionals, education of patients and education of broader citizens around the issues related to healthcare will also be a driver and allow citizens to communicate with one voice to policymakers on the changes that they would like to take place.
