TOWARDS the MEDICINE of the FUTURE

MISSION

It’s now time to move from a reactive medicine, focused on treating the disease after it occurs, to a more predictive and preventive medicine with customized therapies and services able to promote individual health and wellbeing. At present, to determine the best course of actions, the “one size fits all” approach is centered on clinical studies that look at broad groups of patients from different backgrounds and with different risk factors.
We are now poised to transition to a new medical paradigm, where the single individual is at the center of a holistic approach. The emerging revolution in healthcare will lead to a medicine with new dimensions: more predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory (P4) Medicine.
Quantifying the wellness and demystifying the disease are the big challenges of the future medicine. Within this frame, the health systems will face radical changes towards a less invasive, more predictive and preventive medicine with tailored therapeutic approaches, thus impacting not only on individual wellbeing but also on social-economic costs.
The aim of WG Health is to identify medical needs, bottlenecks, knowledge gaps and new/emerging technological solutions to overcome the current obstacles, to elaborate scenarios addressing the urgent societal challenges of wellness and healthcare and to design a time-dimensioned Science & Technology roadmap for an innovative medicine based on individual needs.

MAIN OUTCOMES

Executive Summary Report

1.The 1st Exploratory workshop on “Theranostics for Personalised Medicine” aimed at assessing the impact and potentialities of real and emerging technologies on improving the quality of healthcare in the medium-long term.
The independent international experts identified nanomaterials, “smart vaccines”, tissue regeneration, robotics, point-of care testing, omics, computational systems medicine, as well as a multidisciplinary approach as crucial to face major pathologies (cardiovascular, neurological and neurodegenerative, metabolic and cancer diseases). “Creative assembling” of available tools and technologies to develop “personalized smart systems”, providing diagnostic and therapeutic (theranostics) options and whole person fingerprint, is the key for the novel P4 medicine.

2. Hence, a face-to-face workshop focused on “Theranostics for P4-Medicine” was organized. The aim was to design a road-map for the medicine of the future starting from the patients’ needs, with the participation of Medical Doctors, representatives of public and private research institutions, stakeholders and policymakers. The independent international experts identified the following future actions crucial to face P4 medicine:

- Acquire deeper basic knowledge of health and disease, with a novel and disruptive holistic approach.

- Develop a valid model of risk stratification profiles in order to quickly predict and prevent the disease or, at least, to personalize the therapy for the individual patient.

- Promote individual and social actions for participatory medicine.

A strong emphasis was put on the need to re-contextualize the concept of disease, viewed as phase transition from equilibrium to disequilibrium states, as well as on the impact that environmental factors, including exposome and lifestyle, in addition to nutrition that can modify the gut microbiota biodiversity, have on individual health.

3. A strong link with many of the priorities of WG Food emerged, highlighting the need to consider the impact of personalized nutrition on personalized healthcare.

WG COORDINATOR: Caterina Cinti
E-Mail: caterina.cinti@cnr.it

Scientific Committee
Francesco BALDINI
Daniela BANTI
Enrico CAPOBIANCO
Domenica D’ELIA
Gabriella LEO
Elisabetta SBISA’
Luisa TONDELLI
Maria Giovanna TRIVELLA
Apollonia TULLO