EFA

EFA President Breda Flood will speak at an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) entitled ‘Applying open innovation to bring personalised medicine to new disease areas’. The event will take place in Dublin at the Crowne Plaza Dublin-Northwood Hotel on the afternoon of the 20^th of March. The workshop is organised within the framework of a wider event on innovation and patient access to personalised medicine organised by the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) under the auspices of Ireland’s European Council Presidency. The workshop will feature presentations demonstrating how IMI projects are working on the development of personalised medicines for rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and severe asthma and a debate on how IMI projects’ approach to developing personalised medicines could be extended to other disease areas. It also identifies the importance of public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a tool for pushing forward research in personalized medicines across medical fields. These public partnerships could include academics, industry, small-medium enterprises (SMEs) regulators and patients. As a patient with severe asthma, Breda is keen to see the developments in the accessibility of personalized medicines. She has already participated in a number of IMI events in Brussels and around Europe.  At the workshop, she will discuss why a public-private partnership is needed for severe asthma, how U-BIOPRED is tackling the challenges involved in developing personalized medicines in this area and present headline results of the project thus far and how they could impact patients. In addition, she will provide her opinions on the keys to the project’s success thus far and identify ways in which other scientists researching personalized medicines in other disease areas can learn from the example of the U-BIOPRED project. The workshop will be followed by a conference on innovation and patient access to personalized medicine looking at new approaches to health issues in Europe and current barriers to treatments experienced by patients.  Registration for the IMI workshop and the EAPM event is free but obligatory via the EAPM event registration page. More information on the IMI workshop can be found online here and more information on the EAPM event here.