Getting Personal: Accelerating Personalised and Precision Medicine Integration into Clinical Cancer Research and Care in Clinical Trials

there is a realisation that we need to facilitate an accelerated ‘concept-to-clinic’ culture, but in a way that translates preliminary discovery ‘hits’ into robust but affordable clinical ‘wins’ for our patients. Recognising the need to define barriers and to develop putative solutions to the integration of PPM into clinical cancer research and care, the Brussels-based European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) assembled a multi-stakeholder panel to address whether a PPM-enabled clinical research/clinical trials strategy can underpin better outcomes for cancer patients. A series of faceto-face meetings and teleconferences informed the identification of a number of key challenges ( table 1 ) that form the basis for this special issue of Public Health Genomics . The authors, who are representative of the diverse stakePersonalised and precision medicine (PPM) has the potential to revolutionise not only the treatment but also the prevention of malignancy [1] . Advances such as the successful development of targeted therapies like imatinib mesylate for chronic myeloid leukaemia and Herceptin/trastuzumab for erbB -2-positive breast cancer have changed clinical practice for these disease indications, while a molecular understanding of the human papilloma virus has informed a preventative public health strategy that has underpinned a significant reduction in cervical cancer mortality. However, for every breakthrough therapy like imatinib, there is a succession of ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches that deliver minimal or no benefit, despite the billions of euros/dollars and the number of years invested in their development. Increasingly, Published online: November 14, 2015