04 December 2023 - The newly launched European Partnership for Personalised Medicine (EP PerMed) aims to improve future healthcare for all citizens through personalised therapy, diagnosis and prevention. With a total budget of around €375 million, provided by the EU and more than 50 international partners, EP PerMed will not only significantly support the transnational development of personalised medicine approaches over the next ten years, but also their successful translation into clinical practice. A preliminary announcement for the first joint transnational call for proposals has now been published.
"The concept of personalised medicine combines biomedical research and other disciplines with the use of cutting-edge technologies. The resulting increasing number of personalised therapies enables us to better understand diseases and treat them more precisely, while at the same time reducing unwanted side effects," says Dr Wolfgang Ballensiefen, who is responsible for coordinating the partnership at the German Aerospace Center’s project management agency, DLR Projektträger. "In addition, personalised medicine aims at a specific and early diagnosis of diseases, which enables individualised prognoses and ultimately early and targeted treatment or prevention."
The European Partnership for Personalised Medicine brings together ministries, funding organisations and research institutes from 24 countries and 10 European regions. EP PerMed builds on the results and experience of several international initiatives and projects in the field of personalised medicine, as well as more than 15 years of successful collaboration among many of the partners involved. Over the next ten years (2023-2033), most of EP PerMed’s budget will be available for funding of research projects and the implementation of personalised medicine approaches.
The now announced 1st EP PerMed call will aim to fund research that fosters the identification or validation of targets for personalised medicine approaches. Applicants must combine the research on new and advanced targets with companion biomarker research (companion diagnostics). The final call text will be published early 2024 and will be based on the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for Personalised Medicine (SRIA PerMed).
As outlined in the SRIA, additional EP PerMed activities will focus on actions to support and accelerate innovations in personalised medicine and its uptake into healthcare systems. These activities include, for example, partnering events between the research communities and the private sector, calls for personalised medicine pilots, particularly in a regional context, and surveys to identify and contact key players in the healthcare systems and medical societies.
All steps of the SRIA development and the proposal preparation were strongly supported by numerous PM-experts, stakeholders and the European Commission (EC). The partnership builds on several developments, initiatives and projects such as ERA PerMed, ICPerMed and its supporting projects (“ICPerMed Family”) funded by the EC. The EP PerMed consortium will bring together most of the partners from these initiatives and expand its scope with additional partners from Europe and beyond.
