Initiatives for Personalized Medicine
December 2, 2019

Inspire2Live is cooperating with researchers, oncologists, pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies towards personalized medicine for every patient who is about to get oncolytic medication.

We had fruitful talks on a new model for personalized medicine we want to introduce in the Netherlands first and after that in all European countries. We are working closely together with ‘Open Source Pharma’.

The basis is being formed by a system that uses Artificial Intelligence and compares the data gained from whole genome sequencing to the pharmacogenetical data. This should result in a few medications that are likely to have a positive effect for this specific (the individual) patient.

The next step is testing in a wet lab on tissue culture or organoids which (combination of) medication works best for this specific (the individual) patient.

The final step is treating the patient based on the outcome of those two steps while keeping track of the patient and register the real-life data that gives feedback to the system of artificial intelligence.

Based on the discussion so far, we decided to focus first on a group of patients with an unmet medical need, but we all agreed on the possibilities such a system should offer in the future for all patients diagnosed with cancer. It should become possible to test in the same way pharmacogenetical data of medication that never reached the market because it only worked in a too limited number of patients. Therefore, it was not allowed to be part of the health care system.

This way new treatments should be able to reach the patient better, faster and cheaper with a more predictable outcome. It should also make new pricing arrangements possible (fair pricing/ pay per performance) and in that way, guarantees the access to the best treatments possible.

Examples of our initiatives are (among others): WGS for pancreatic cancer patients, WGS for glioblastoma patients and the use of organoids for drug screening in pancreatic cancer patients.

The work on the part of Inspire2Live within this initiative is being carried out by Piarella Peralta, Daan van den Akker, Henk van Kranen, Herman Otten and Peter Kapitein.

Peter Kapitein
Patient Advocate Inspire2Live