The need for collaboration in the future delivery of improved therapies for patients

Abstract

The defining issue for the improvement of health care in the future, both in Europe and around the world, is the need for enhanced collaboration. This is vital if we want to deliver true medical innovation to patients with unmet and intractable medical conditions and do so in a predictable and costeffective manner. All disciplines that are involved in this worthy endeavour must find better ways to work together. Obviously, this includes the industry to which I have belonged for many years, but also regulators, prescribers, patients, payers, academics, and public and private enterprises. Trying to create such collaborations is a challenge. If it had been easy we would have done it a long time ago. However, I do think that the advent of stratified (sometimes referred to as ‘personalised’) medicines provide a long awaited impetus to such drive interdisciplinary engagement. By stratified medicines, what I am referring to are medicines that can be specifically targeted to subpopulations of patients on the basis of their genetic, metabolic and molecular profiles. The question is why stratified medicine should provide such a common focus across the healthcare sector? In order to understand this, we should start with the evolutions currently occurring in science.