p-medicine in brief

Medicine is currently undergoing a major revolution that is gradually transforming the nature of healthcare from reactive to preventive.  The changes are catalysed by a new systems approach to disease that have triggered the emergence of personalized medicine — a medicine that focuses on the integrated diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease in individual patients.

This change is rooted in new science. The convergence of systems approaches to disease, new measurement, modelling and visualization technologies, and new computational and mathematical tools are expected to allow our current, largely reactive mode of medicine to be replaced over the next 10 to 20 years by a personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine. While the goal is clear, the path to such advances has been fraught with roadblocks in terms of technical, scientific, and sociological challenges.

In developing an innovative and integrated technological solution to enable personalised medicine the current project responds to an urgent societal need. Our emphasis is on formulating an open, modular framework of tools and services, so that p-medicine can be adopted gradually, including efficient secure sharing and handling of large personalized data sets, enabling demanding Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) multiscale simulations (in silico oncology), building standards-compliant tools and models for VPH research, drawing on the VPH Toolkit and providing tools for large-scale, privacy-preserving data and literature mining, a key component of VPH research. We will ensure that privacy, non-discrimination, and access policies are aligned to maximize protection of and benefit to patients. The p-medicine tools and technologies will be validated within the concrete setting of advanced clinical research. Pilot cancer trials have been selected based on clear research objectives, emphasising the need to integrate multilevel datasets, in the domains of Wilms tumour, breast cancer and leukaemia. To sustain a self-supporting infrastructure realistic use cases will be built that will demonstrate tangible results for clinicians.

Factsheet

Title
From data sharing and integration via VPH models to personalized medicine

Acronym
p-medicine

Project duration
54 months (February 1st, 2011 – July 31, 2015)

Requested funding
13,329,908 Euro 

Call identifier
FP7-ICT-2009.5.3 Virtual Physiological Human – ICT tools, services and specialised infrastructure for the biomedical researcher.

EU Funding 
The European Integrated Project p-medicine is supported through Coordination Theme 3 (Information and Communication Technologies) of the European Community's 7th Framework Programme, Grant agreement number 270089.