Demonstration pilots for implementation of personalised medicine in healthcare

Personalised medicine (PM) has the potential to respond to, among others, the increasing burden of co-morbidities and thus enhance the sustainability of healthcare systems. With the increasing number of scientific approaches available, it is crucial to demonstrate the benefit of large scale deployment of personalised medicine to citizens and healthcare systems. This was also one of the conclusions of the Personalised Medicine Conference 2016.

Scope

The pilot projects should demonstrate the benefit for individuals as well as the implementability and economic viability of personalised medicine approaches in real life healthcare settings. The pilots should be tailored to the needs of citizens, making use of a wide variety of data and proposing prediction, prevention or treatment solutions, focussing on diseases with high burden to society (taking due account of sex/gender differences) and including multi-morbidity conditions if relevant. The use of big data approaches and high performance computing is encouraged. Applicants should ensure coordination with national, regional or local authorities engaging in healthcare environments and should aim at linking different institutions (hospitals, other healthcare facilities, public health authorities, payers etc.). The pilot projects should engage partners in regions or cities having adopted or that are in advanced planning for introducing PM approaches. Patient representatives as well as partners from countries that are in the process of upgrading their healthcare systems should be involved, ensuring a wide European dimension. Applicants should address the health economic, ethical, legal and societal aspects of the proposed action. Taking into account the advances already achieved for PM approaches in cancer and rare diseases, projects with primary focus on these diseases are excluded from the scope of this topic.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 18 and EUR 20 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact

• Evidence for a PM-based model of care that can be used as a basis for the delivery of new ways of care organisation.
• Demonstration of the viability and feasibility of PM approaches in real-life settings and at a large scale, exemplifying potential for savings in overall healthcare costs.
• Widening of PM approaches to include diseases other than cancer and rare diseases.
• Linking of different actors for healthcare, economy, lifestyle, healthy living and regulation, making use of the multitude of data available.

Cross-cutting Priorities

• Open Innovation
• Gender
• Socio-economic science and humanities