Towards a prevention model of health care

Precision Medicine: From "Omics" to Economics towards Data-Driven Healthcare - Time for European Transformation

There is room for improvement for optimally bringing the latest science to the patient while taking into account patient priorities such as quality of life. Too often, regulatory agencies, governments, and funding agencies do not stimulate the integration of research into care and vice versa. Re-engineering the drug development process is a priority, and healthcare systems are long due for transformation. On one hand, patients need efficient access to treatments, but despite precision oncology approaches, efficiently shared screening platforms for sorting patients based on the biology of their tumour for trial access are lacking and, on the other hand, the true value of cancer care is poorly addressed as central questions such as dose, scheduling, duration, and combination are not or sub-optimally addressed by registration trials. Solid evidence on those parameters could potentially lead to a rational and wiser use of anti-cancer treatments. Together, optimally targeting patient population and robust comparative effectiveness data could lead to more affordable and economically sound approaches. The drug development process and healthcare models need to be interconnected through redesigned systems taking into account the full math from drug development into affordable care.

European perspective for effective cancer drug development

Health systems and the clinical research landscape evolve continuously owing to increased risk aversion, scrutiny by funding bodies, and costs of clinical trials. In this context, however, current drug development procedures are far from optimal, as exemplified by the late-stage failure of several drugs. The identification of new drugs urgently requires approaches based on a solid understanding of cancer biology, and that will support the design of robust confirmatory trials. The complexity and the costs of drug development are now beyond the knowledge and operational capacity of single organisations, therefore, a drastic deviation from the traditional path of drug discovery and new forms of multidisciplinary partnerships are needed to succeed in this sector. The European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) proposes the use of collaborative molecular screening platforms (CMSPs) as a new approach to tackle this issue. These CMSPs have the advantage of optimizing the expertise of several partners and combining efforts alongside with cost-sharing models for efficient patient selection. This article describes some of the challenges to advancing drug development and improving medical treatments and how these hurdles can be overcome.