We at the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine look forward to welcoming you to our third annual conference.
EAPM is delighted to have secured the use of a magnificent building; close to the European Parliament, as the venue for our top-level, two-day gathering.
Many of you attended our inaugural conference, held in 2013 in Dublin under the auspices of the Irish Presidency of the EU, as well as last year’s forum at Bibliotheque Solvay. This year, with two smaller nations – Latvia and Luxembourg – holding the rotating EU Presidency, the Alliance will focus on the fact that health policies need to recognise and tackle the inherent health system vulnerabilities faced, specifically, by smaller countries and in the regions of the larger ones.
We call this a SMART approach – Smaller Member states And Regions Together; and this will be further developed at the conference.
Among the high-level speakers will be the Health Commissioner, the health ministers from Latvia, Luxembourg and Malta, and (so far confirmed) seven Members of the European Parliament. These will be joined by you – the most influential stakeholder representatives driving personalised medicine during six plenary sessions.
The plenary topics will be representative of EAPM’s membership (patients, medical professionals, healthcare planners, industry, scientists and researchers), and reflect the solid work programmes developed since the Alliance’s formation and, from these discussions, a set of recommendations will emerge which EAPM hopes will support and strengthen Luxembourg’s Council Conclusions on Personalised Medicine due later in the year.
Uniquely in the sphere of PM in Europe, the Alliance has achieved one of its goals of bringing all stakeholders together under one roof. If EAPM and its members are to realise the ultimate goal of creating a healthier Europe for 500 million citizens across 28 countries, we must do so together. This conference will take us a few steps along the road to much-needed multi-stakeholder collaboration.
Indeed, our STEPs http://www.supportbase.eu.com/eapm/steps-campaign.html campaign – which stands for Specialised Treatment for Europe’s Patients – highlights that the Alliance is working tirelessly to help deliver ‘the right treatment for the right patient at the right time’. Our goal is to ensure that personalised medicine forms a major part of the EU’s health strategy, now and long into the future.
