The Nordic Precision Medicine Forum, a project of UK-based Arch Events Ltd, has posted a recap of their 2nd annual meeting, which was held in Copenhagen. The meeting brings together representatives from for-profit and nonprofit groups to network and "share ideas, knowledge and findings from their respective fields."
Here's an excerpt from the second day of the meeting:
The second day began with a lively panel debate. Olli Kallioneimi, Professor at Karolinska Institute and Director at SciLifeLab; Paul W Franks, from the Lund University Diabetes Centre and Bogi Eliasen, a Health Futurist from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies discussed issues facing the clinical implementation of precision medicine and cross-border collaboration.
Chairing the discussion, Vivienne Parry invited the speakers to define precision medicine. “What does it actually mean?” she asked. “If I was a politician, a policy maker or even a member of the public, I would be really confused.” Kallioneimi agreed: “We are discussing a term that everybody views in a different way,” he said. “We should make it much clearer to ourselves. When it is clear to ourselves only at that point can we try to get the politicians onboard, and the decision-makers, and the funders, and the public and the patients as well.”
“Over the last few years,” Eliasen said, “there has been much confusion on this. Was it personalised health? Was it personalised medicine? Is it precision medicine? Is it a focus on just disease or is there a focus on health in order to get a bigger picture? This must be confusing for the politicians and the public as we are using terms for the same thing and the same term for different things”
Franks concurred but suggested there are good stratifications of contexts in precision medicine, citing the FDA’s lesser-known biomarker guidelines as one such reference “As a lexicon for precision medicine it is a very useful guide,” he said. “But not many people are aware of this stratification.”
Read more from the meeting, and also check out a sister meeting from Arch Events called the Benelux Precision Medicine Forum (see report from the 2018 inaugural meeting).