On 7th of November we attended the final conference in Brussels of the EU-funded research project Personalized PREvention of Chronic DIseases (PRECeDI). The project aims to promote knowledge transfer in research activities within the field of personalized medicine prevention of chronic diseases, which can lead to a proper integration of genomics, for instance, into public health interventions.
In Europe, only 2.8% of health expenditure is for prevention activities. In this field, personalized approaches are already being implemented in some areas, such as disease diagnosis and treatment with the use of biomarkers. But the development and implementation of such approaches for chronic diseases prevention need further investigation and concerted efforts for proper implementation in healthcare systems. In this context, PRECeDI worked on a set of recommendations for policy-makers, scientists and industry in the following five research domains: the identification of biomarkers for the prevention of chronic diseases, economic evaluation of predictive genomic applications, ethico-legal and policy issues surrounding personalized medicine, sociotechnical analysis of the pros and the cons of informing healthy individuals on their genome and identification of organizational models for the provision of predictive genetic testing.
The implementation of the recommendations developed could benefit patients thanks to a personalized approach. In this sense, the treatment could be optimized towards the “right treatment” in the “right dose” at the “right time” for each patient (Lyudmil Ninov, EPF), allowing patients to suffer fewer side effects, to avoid ineffective treatments and to develop an accurate dosing based on their individual metabolism.
To learn more on the Personalized PREvention of Chronic Diseases (PRECeDI) follow this link.