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Making futuristic
medicine a reality
Supported by
mammoth funding, European research institutions are embarking on a
massive, multi-faceted, scientific endeavour to achieve “visionary
technological goals”. Following an initial year-long pilot project
phase, two flagship initiatives will be chosen under the banner European
Future Technologies or FET, each funded to the tune of a billion Euros.
They will run for 10 years in an effort to achieve these futuristic goals.
On its
own, the medicine-related facet –
the Information Technology Future of
Medicine (ITFoM), one of six pilot projects
– could have far-reaching implications
for the future of medicine. This innovative
initiative is the first to address worldwide
individualised patient care in combination
with genomics and medical requirements.
To prepare the launch of the FET
Flagships, six Pilot Actions have been
initiated. Each has been funded with 1.5
million Euros for a 12-month period
running to May next year. In the second
half of 2012, two of the Pilots will be
selected and launched as full FET Flagship
Initiatives in 2013.
As one of the six Pilot Actions, the ITFoM project brings together 26 partners
and 20 associated members including
academic institutes and private companies
from 15 countries.
“They are like The Human Genome
projects in which we participated,” says
Hans Lehrach, Director at the Max Planck
Institute for Molecular Genetics and The
Dahlem Centre for Genome Research and
Medical Systems Biology in Berlin,
Germany. Professor Lehrach is coordinator
of the ITFoM project.
Specifically, ITFoM aims to make individualised
medicine a reality through
innovation in Information and
Communications Technology.
A spokesperson for ITFoM explains that
as data-intensive analysis and computer
intensive modelling become common clinical
practice, ICT capacity and organisation
will become key limiting factors in
medicine; this will result in a shift of
resources from personnel-intensive to ICTintensive applications. Clinical needs
will
be the driving force behind future ICT
innovation.
Data-rich, individualised medicine
poses unprecedented challenges for ICT
in terms of hardware, storage and
communication. Making personalised
medicine a reality will thus require
fundamental advances in the computational
sciences. It is with this in mind
that ITFoM brings together world
leading research groups from across
Europe and beyond. ITFoM proposes a
medicine based on computer models
(‘virtual patients’) derived from molecular,
physiological, anatomical and environmental
data generated for every individual
patient. These ‘virtual patients’
will then be used to identify individually
optimised prevention/therapy schedules
and minimise potential side effects of
treatment regimes.
To develop this ICT-driven medicine of
the future, ITFoM will prepare for the
amalgamation of four major areas:
- The first is medicine itself – from specimen
analysis and diagnosis provision to
clinical practice and patient consent;
- The second concerns analytical techniques,
covering functional genomics
and imaging technology analyses on a
routine basis;
- The third focuses on integration, developing
tools required to incorporate the
gathered clinical data, and generated
analytical data into models that will
inform relevant health providers;
- The fourth area involves the ICT developments
required to tackle the immense
computational challenges.
The
ultimate goals of ITFoM
-
The first goal is to give each patient’s
doctor the power to analyse a person‘s
human genome at every stage of disease
management – through diagnosis, treatment
and follow-up. This will require a
revolution in ICT technologies so that
relevant computing, storage, networking
and modelling technologies are developed;
- The second goal is to enable the
connection of high throughput biomolecular
characterisation and clinical
imaging technologies.
Beneficiaries of this linkage will include:
the patient and their doctor; drug
researchers in both the discovery and development
phases; epidemiologists attempting
to analyse health trends; and policy- and
decision-makers developing effective
national and EU-wide health policy options
and legislation. Enabling this connection
will require a revolution in integrated information
management and decision making.
This constitutes a fundamental transformation
of biomedical science – from probability-
based and empirical to evidence-based
and knowledge-driven.
ITFoM says that the project outcomes
will enable the prediction of health,
disease, therapy and its effects for individual
patients and through application
in the clinic will change the future of
medicine.
ITFoM
http://www.itfom.eu
Date
of upload: 18th Oct 2011
