The Joint Committee of the Nordic Medical Research Councils (NOS-M) has made personalised medicine one of their areas of major interest. They recently published the Executive Summary of the NOS-M Workshop 2016 Nordic Common Strengths and Future Potential in the Field of Personalised Medicine. It can be downloaded at the NOS-M webpage.
Some excerpts:
- The workshop attracted more than 70 participants, including representatives of Nordic research financing organisations, policymakers, and experts on personalised medicine
- The importance of political will was raised, and the fact that the Nordic countries in many respects
have very similar systems will probably entail fewer challenges at the Nordic level compared to e.g.
at the EU level. - One current bottleneck is data sharing and the related legal and ethical questions.
- It is important to engage the healthcare providers.
- It is important to have a common definition of personalised medicine. In the US, precision
medicine is very much focused on genomics, whereas personalised medicine in Europe is more
holistic. - Personalised medicine is about making healthcare smarter and better by using multiple
information sources about the person, his/her environment and lifestyle focusing on prediction
and prevention shifting from treating disease to managing health. To achieve this it is necessary
to work together across disciplines, organisations and countries.