The European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) held a high-level workshop on ‘Pathways to Personalised Medicine: Rewarding innovation in times of budget constraint’, featuring multi-stakeholders and including representatives from Member State government, the European Parliament and the Commission.

This inter-institutional discussion, featuring a keynote speech from Maggie De Block, Belgium’s Health Minister and hosted by former European Health Commissioner David Byrne, formed part of EAPM’s SMART Outreach programme, which will see ‘on-the-ground’ events in several EU countries over this and the coming years.

The Alliance’s June 2015 EAPM conference introduced the ‘SMART’ concept, which stands for Smaller Member States and Regions Together, and EAPM has been expanding this by taking its message directly to EU countries.

Successful outreach events have already been held in Poland, Austria and Bulgaria and more are planned in 2016 at venues in the UK, France, Ireland, Italy, Germany and a second event in Poland.

Although Brussels-based – which helps to better engage with the European Commission, EU permanent representations and the European Parliament in the ‘Capital of Europe’ - EAPM believes it is time to place its feet firmly on the ground in more EU countries, in order to expand its work with the multi-stakeholder groups, and nations, that form its membership.

As well as De Block  and Byrne, speakers at today’s meeting included Ruud Dobber, Executive Vice-President Europe, AstraZeneca; Philippe de Backer, MEP; Bengt Jönsson, Vice-Chair of DG SANTE’s expert panel on effective ways of investing in health; Christian Siebert, Head of Unit, Biotechnology and Food Supply Chain, DG GROW; Prof Walter Van Dyck, Vlerick Business School, and; Robert Johnstone, of the European Patients’ Forum.

At the event, Maggie de Block emphasised that personalised medicine represents the dawn of an exciting new age in healthcare, but also that healthcare systems and thinking will need to change accordingly.

She said: “Making access to personalised medicine, a reality for patients is …a call for action addressed to creative policymakers in order to take the necessary initiatives to allow for more effective early diagnoses, safer, better and tailored treatments for patients.”

AstraZeneca’s Ruud Dobber focused on personalised medicine as a gamechanger in the arena of health, one that will benefit from a multistakeholder approach and that is geared towards putting patients at the centre of their own healthcare.

However, he warned lawmakers that: “Policies that focus on short-term austerity measures are unwise and unsustainable. They will not enable us to translate the promise of today’s science into the reality of improving patient outcomes.”

Belgian MEP De Backer, meanwhile, told the meeting that: “Current reimbursement systems, with short-term budget pressures, work in favour of treatments that might generate less value overall.”

And Robert Johnstone zoomed in on the patient perspective, and the barriers to access to the best available treatments that still exist across the EU.

He said: “The best available health care is a right under the basic tenets of the EU, not part of a win-some, lose-some game. And as modern-day patients we refuse to play the health care lottery any longer.”

Kicking-off the meeting, Byrne had previously said: “Personalised medicine starts with the patient. It has enormous potential for improving the health of many patients and ensuring better outcomes. Yet, its integration into clinical practice and daily care is proving difficult given the many barriers and challenges to timely access to targeted healthcare that still exist as of today.”

Generally speaking, the huge advances in personalised medicine over the past few years (and rapidly rising awareness of this new way of diagnosing and treating patients) has led to the Luxembourg Presidency of the EU holding a high-level conference on the topic, the results of which will form part of the Duchy’s Council Conclusions at the end of this year.

This constitutes a great leap forward for all stakeholders, most notably the patients themselves.

The question now is how to apply these advances to the health systems in various EU countries.

As well as its SMART Outreach programme, EAPM also works tirelessly in vital health-related areas including, but not exclusive to, new models for clinical trials (highlighted in a recent Vienna meeting), Big Data legislation, IVDs and the much-debated concept of ‘value’.

Meanwhile, given that personalised medicine has exploded in recent years, but that significant barriers still stand in the way of seeing its successful integration into EU health systems, EAPM’s Dutch Presidency conference in Spring 2016 will focus on ‘Taking Stock’.

This will assess where personalised medicine is today and the ways to move it forward in the future for the benefit of 500 million potential patients across 28 Member States.

The conference will also reiterate the points in the Alliance’s ongoing STEPs campaign.

This stands for Specialised Treatment for Europe’s Patients and consists of the following:

• STEP 1: Ensuring a regulatory environment which allows early patient access to novel and efficacious personalised medicine (PM)
• STEP 2: Increasing research and development for PM, while recognising its value
• STEP 3: Improving the education and training of healthcare professionals
• STEP 4: Supporting new approaches to reimbursement and HTA assessment, required for patient access to PM
• STEP 5: Increasing awareness and understanding of PM

Source: European Alliance For Personalised Medicine