By Danny Burke, ecancer

For many years, healthcare has been a reactive discipline.  In recent years, however, medicine has undergone a revolutionary shift.  The ‘p-medicine’ project (www.p-medicine.eu) is an EU funded FP7 initiative leading the way, transforming this reactive treatment into a preventative and predictive approach, known as ‘personalised’ medicine.  The project will develop new tools and computer models which support this ‘personalised’ approach and will achieve this through a series of close collaborations with other EU funded FP7 projects. 

The most important of these is a collaboration with the VPH-Share project (www.vph-share.org) which aims to facilitate interactions between Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) researchers by making it easy to share and find models tools and data.  Both projects will work closely together to add value to the VPH domain as well as avoiding the creation of different and independent infrastructures. 

One of the aims of p-medicine is to provide cancer patients with improved access to clinical trials information.  A close collaboration with CONTRACT – Consent in a trial and care environment (www.contract-fp7.eu), a project examining the current legal, ethical, technical and clinical handling of patient consent for clinical trials, will ensure p-medicine’s tools conform to the latest data practices. 

The TUMOR project – Transatlantic Tumor Model Repositories (www.tumor-project.eu) aims to implement an EU cancer model repository and to develop specific tools and methods for working with existing EU and US cancer models.  The p-medicine project will be working with TUMOR to ensure that their models and tools are internationally available and will evolve beyond the EU boundaries. 

Information on these collaborations and more can be found within the first p-medicine newsletter which marks the 1^st birthday of the project.  Read the full newsletter here, http://bit.ly/xY2NBN where you will also be able to find out about the Summer School in ‘Computational Ontology’ and the project’s efforts to support tailor-made therapies for cancer patients.