An important agenda item in this 1.5 day meeting was ICPerMed’s follow-up on the Action Plan published in March this year. The consortium developed a strategy to closely follow and report funding and related activities in this context on a regional, national and European level.

In addition, activities for the up-coming ICPerMed conference in Berlin that will take place on 20-21 November 2018 were discussed.

The European Commission informed about ongoing initiatives in the field. They presented a video featuring ICPerMed as one of several initiatives in the field.

A new ERA-Net for Personalised Medicine, ERA PerMed, is about to start in December this year and will collaborate closely with ICPerMed. It was presented shortly by its coordinator, Rafael de Andres Medina from ISCIII, who is also a member of ICPerMed, as are many other participating institutions. Two high-level guest speakers gave very interesting talks, showing a high potential for collaboration and synergies with ICPerMed:

• Henk-Jan Guchelaar, the coordinator of the EU-funded pilot study Ubiquitous Pharmacogenomics (U-PGx) talked about challenges and bottlenecks for the implementation of pharmacogenomics in daily clinical practice.
• Stefano Vella the Project Coordinator of the EU-funded coordination and support action TO-REACH – transferring innovation in health systems, talked about challenges in implementing personalised medicine in health systems and synergies with ICPerMed.

© National Institute of Health/ Ricardo Jorge