EPEMED and PM Connective

An alliance to jointly remove barriers limiting the promise of Personalised Medicine

In a first-of-its-kind alliance, a European and an American not-for-profit have decided to become an integrated voice promoting the creation of a new business model for personalised medicine (PM) both in the EU and the U.S. The focus of this global collaboration is the integration of best practices in clinical, regulatory, and payor business models and policies to unlock the full potential of personalised medicine and the distribution of the value generated across all stakeholders. Currently, each of the various stakeholders or “silos” of the healthcare industry optimize in their own domains, which can often result in reduced health outcomes for patients and increased healthcare costs.

One example of the shortcomings of this siloed approach is the recent concern about high profile and costly new drugs. State-of-the-art diagnostics are the driving force in many of these new therapies, yet their contribution to reshaping the clinical pathway and enabling early treatment is poorly incentivized frequently resulting in delayed implementation. At the same time, today’s more expensive but targeted drugs are not delivering the promised healthcare cost reductions due to their implementation later in the treatment pathway.

“After much research and analysis, we identified that PM is unlikely to deliver on its original promise without rethinking about how to deliver radical outcome change,” said Alison Finger, SVP of Marketing at bluebird bio in Cambridge, MA and one of the founding Directors of the PM Connective.  “In simple terms, PM only makes sense when you proactively engineer the integration of multiple technologies and education into the patient pathway. With everyone focused on only their part, we believe market forces will take decades to deliver this.”

An important goal of the EPEMED and PM Connective alliance is bringing together best practices from Europe and the United States. According to Emmanuelle Benzimra, Executive Director of EPEMED and Co-Chairperson of the PM Connective, “Our joint initiative holds the promise of not only integrating multiple industry stakeholders, but also bridging diverse geographic boundaries with global best practices.  EPEMED is actively engaged with the PM Connective to ensure that our European experts, and most importantly European patients, have access to promising new models for implementing personalised medicine.”

The PM Connective was conceived a year ago at a multi-stakeholder expert forum held in Dublin. The forum identified the primary barriers holding back better outcomes in personalised medicine, which include: imbalanced incentives between pharma and diagnostic/laboratory companies; insufficient incorporation of patients, physicians, and pathologists in the pharma and diagnostic firm market development; delivery of PM technologies in siloed business models; and lack of evidence of the radical impact underpinning the original promise of PM. This vision was reaffirmed at a follow-up expert forum in Philadelphia in September 2015, which recognized the formal launch of the PM Connective.

“Each of the stakeholders in the current healthcare business model focus on costs and clinical benefits within their respective silos; however, at a disease outcomes level, this may be a suboptimal solution”, explained Jeff Waldron, Executive Director of the PM Connective. “My team will work closely with EPEMED to cut across those verticals to create and validate a new, integrated PM business model at the disease level that will deliver reward commensurate with better outcomes.  Gaining access to EPEMED’s expertise and vast knowledge base will accelerate our efforts.”

Background

The European Personalised Medicine Association (EPEMED) was founded in 2009 by a group of European leaders with extensive expertise in stratified medicine and the application and development of diagnostic tools.  It provides an independent voice and a catalyst that acts for advancing personalised medicine in Europe and the breakthrough role of diagnostics and associated drug-companion diagnostics technologies in improving patient outcomes.  To achieve its mission, EPEMED hosts conferences, funds independent research and education programs, and actively advocates for industry and public policy solutions.

For more information, contact:

Emmanuelle Benzimra, Executive Director, EPEMED
Email: ebenzimra@epemed.org

The PM Connective understands personalised medicine as a value-driving paradigm that requires the active collaboration of a variety of stakeholders including pharmaceutical, diagnostic and medical device companies as well as healthcare providers, patient advocacies, payors, and regulators. Currently, however, there is uncertainty if value capture at one end will lead to loss in value for another stakeholder, as such, collaborations are still scarce and value capture is not optimized over the entire value chain. Therefore, there is a need in the market to qualitatively and quantitatively define an integrative framework to generate, optimize and capture value through these PM collaborations. To address this challenge, the PM Connective has been founded by a group of industry leaders and functions as an independent nonprofit organization. It was registered in New Jersey as a 501(c)(6) entity in July 2015.

For more information, contact:

Jeffrey Waldron, Executive Director, PM Connective
Email: JR.Waldron@pmconnective.org