Clouds across the new dawn for clinical, diagnostic and biological data: accelerating the development, delivery and uptake of personalized medicine
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Denis Horgan
, Ettore Capoluongo
, France Dube , Dario Trapani , Umberto Malapelle , Vita Rovite , Muhammad Imran Omar , Catherine Alix-Panabières , Piotr Rutkowski , Arnaud Bayle , Allan Hackshaw , Paul Hofman and Vivek Subbiah
Abstract
Growing awareness of the genetic basis of disease is transforming the opportunities for improving patient care by accelerating the development, delivery and uptake of personalised medicine and diseases diagnostics. This can mean more precise treatments reaching the right patients at the right time at the right cost. But it will be possible only with a coherent European Union (EU) approach to regulation. For clinical and biological data, on which the EU is now legislating with its planned European Health Data Space (EHDS), it is crucial that the design of this new system respects the constraints also implicit in the testing which generates data. The current EHDS proposal may fail to meet this requirement. It risks being over-ambitious, while taking insufficient account of the demanding realities of data access in daily practice and current economics/business models. It is marred by imprecision and ambiguity, by overlaps with other EU legislation, and by lack of clarity on funding. This paper identifies key issues where legislators should ensure that the opportunities are not squandered by the adoption of over-hasty or ill-considered provisions that jeopardise the gains that could be made in improved healthcare.
Funding source: European Union
Award Identifier / Grant number: 101080005
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the members of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM), Piers Mahon from Digicore and the representatives of the European Commission and Member States for their kind input. The paper reflects EAPM and individuals’ opinions, not to be ascribed to the institutions of affiliation or possible other representative roles of the authors. Vita Rovite was supported by European Regional Development Fund within the project “DECIDE – Development of a dynamic informed consent system for biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration” (No. 1.1.1.1/20/A/047).
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Research funding: This research was funded by Reducing Disparities Across the European Union (BEACON) Project Number: 101080005.
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Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: Denis Horgan is an employee of the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine, which receives funding from both the public and private sectors. France Dube is an employee of Astra Zeneca.
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Informed consent: Not applicable.
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Ethical approval: Not applicable.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- Frontmatter
- Reviews
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- Opinion Papers
- The challenge of clinical reasoning in chronic multimorbidity: time and interactions in the Health Issues Network model
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- Detection of fake papers in the era of artificial intelligence
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