REGIONS4PERMED

Personalised medicine (PM) represents a paradigm shift away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the treatment and care of patients with a particular condition, to one which uses emergent approaches in particular technological areas such as diagnostic tests, functional genomic technologies, molecular pathways (etc.) to better manage patients’ health and to target therapies. Nowadays the challenge for national and regional authorities is to enable the shift from a REACTIVE healthcare system (based on episodic and acute care model) to a PREVENTIVE (stratifying at-risk individuals and ensure that preventive action is taken to intervene well before the onset of symptoms, let alone illness) and PREDICTIVE (leverage and integrate cutting-edge technologies to not only stratify risk, but even predict risk and intervene even further upstream) system – the so called Personalised Health (PH). In the face of this potential huge leap forward, the fact that personalised health lacks the cooperation and coordination needed to organise the still very fragmented field is a severe drawback to its development and to the placement of investments in an effective manner. For this reason, it is crucial to direct major efforts towards coordinating and aligning relevant stakeholders in personalised health action across Europe and beyond; create a participatory approach; build trust; enable a multi-stakeholder process; channel investments towards Personalised Health. All this considered, Regions4PerMed will coordinate regional policies and innovation programmes in Personalised Medicine and Personalised Health to accelerate the deployment of PH for citizens and patients. The project will reinforce the cooperation between H 2020 and ESIF on PH aspects; Strengthen industrial specialisation areas in Europe and allow PH to flourish as an Emerging Industry; Enable interregional joint investment on PH, including a stable link with Vanguard Initiative and with the European Innovation Council.