Secretariat for the International Consortium for Personalised Medicine (ICPerMed)

The potential of personalised medicine (PM) is to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases by taking into account individuals' genotypes and phenotypes as well as other biomedical, life style and environmental data.

However, with some exceptions in cancer and rare diseases, PM has not yet arrived in clinical practice due to fragmentation, undefined legal and regulatory frameworks and its unclear economic value.

To overcome these hurdles, ICPerMed was founded to initiate and support communication and exchange on PM research, funding and implementation.

ICPerMed provides a platform to identify the requirements for a suitable framework in terms of infrastructures, resources and regulatory procedures to foster the development and implementation of PM.

The ICPerMed Secretariat will continue to substantially contribute to the success of ICPerMed by efficiently coordinating all consortium activities.

This includes supporting the ICPerMed governance and working groups as well as organising ICPerMed internal meetings and thematic events.

A further important task of the ICPerMed Secretariat will be the implementation of an effective dissemination plan and the assistance in the development of a sustainability strategy.

By monitoring ongoing research funding activities and collecting “Best Practice Examples”, the secretariat will provide the basis for evidence informed allocation of research funding and regulatory framework and standard development. The ICPerMed Secretariat will guide the dialogue with relevant stakeholders and initiatives.

It will support training measures in PM in order to facilitate implementation of PM into practice.

The organisational and logistical support of a secretariat will maximise the unique and long-term impact of ICPerMed by strengthening Europe's leading role in the successful implementation of PM in the global context.