Euro BioIndustry Calls for Smoother Path to Personalized Medicines

The European Association of BioIndustries, EuropaBio, has called on policymakers to remove the hurdles preventing European patients’ access to personalized medicine (PM).

At the EU’s “Making Access to Personalised Medicine a Reality for Patients” conference yesterday, the Association repeated its argument that biopharma companies face high costs of clinical development for regulatory approval against a backdrop of increasingly fragmented reimbursement systems and assessment mechanisms unfit for the specificities of personalized therapies.

EuropaBio’s recent White Paper on Personalised Medicine identifies the "essential changes needed to successfully integrate personalized medicine approaches into existing healthcare systems".

Hugh Pullen, Chair of the EuropaBio Task Force on Personalized Medicine, commented: “[W]e wish to see a concrete action plan within the adaptive pathways pilot program focused on speeding up PM regulatory approval. In addition, there is a need for HTA agencies to better collaborate on defining value assessment framework for personalized medicine to accelerate progress in the field. Finally, the implementation of measures to monitor the concrete uptake of personalized medicine in the Member States is overdue.”