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Personalized Medicine - A Mega Trend Worldwide
Improving treatment success rates whilst minimising side effects - the pharma industry yearning for standardised data exchanges - is now in a position to build the groundworks for faster and more efficient research processes.
The dream of offering personalized medicine with treatments and medicine tailored to single individuals is not new as precision medicine, enhanced by worldwide interconnectedness and has been a much sought-after development to improve health systems everywhere.
The Swiss Federal Government has launched one of the largest initiatives in this field. Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN, https://sphn.ch/) is bringing representatives from areas of health, research, teaching and administration to one table – with the communal goal to make medical and patient data, obtained by hospitals and doctors, semantically and technically interoperably available to other partners in this project. The future and success of personalized medicine will depend on the availability and exchange of medical Big Data. This standardisation of data is not only carried out nationally but on an international scale. Five University Hospitals are the key players in the development as well as the „feeding“ of this great new data base.
The first phase in this initiative began with the creation and implementation of a specialized IT-structure. The second phase, starting this year, will include the expansion of cooperating partner hospitals across Switzerland. The costs for this phase of 68 million Swiss Francs will largely be borne by the Federal Government. Partners from pharma industries will - for the first time - receive access to relevant patient medical data, following correct data protection and ethical standard procedures. They are in-turn, invited to share data from their own sources and share them with other partners in the network such as doctors and hospitals.
Pharma company Roche for example, is sharing data of patients taking part in research treatment studies for Multiple Sclerosis through an application called „Floodlight“.
The sector of pharmaceutical industries is pleased to see more interactivity between the differenct branches of the medical sector. Marcel Sennhauser, speaker of the Science Industries Association (https://www.scienceindustries.ch/) explains that Switzerland is lagging behind many other nations when it comes to expert networks and data exchange amongst partners working in the medical sector and that the access gained with this new initiative will greatly enhance research and accelerate the improvment of therapies.
On average, only one in 5‘000 to 10‘000 research projects will result in a medical drug being tested, actually produced and sold in a pharmacy. The average time it takes for such a drug to be tried, tested and produced is currently around 13 years and will result in costs of approximately 1.0 to 1.6 billion US Dollars. The first and longest phase of a research project relies heavily on data and here the quantity and quality of available data is extremely important and relevant to the length of the evaluation process. In this area alone, personalised medicine could offer a big contribution.
March 27, 2020
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