Personalized Medicine: Empowering Patients for a Better Quality of Life

2023-10-18 12:56:21

A moment of the meeting.

Patients must be “a fundamental piece for the development of personalized medicine,” as indicated by the experts who this Wednesday participated in a new edition, the twentieth, of the ‘POP Breakfasts’, a day organized by the Patient Organization Platform (POP) which on this occasion had the title, ‘Personalized medicine to improve the lives of patients’.

The president of the POP, Carina Escóbar, considers that personalized medicine represents “a halo of hope for patients.” Therapeutic innovation, she indicates, “has brought good things to patients and has allowed us to have the ability to work and have equal conditions with respect to the rest of the population.” Furthermore, he stressed that it is important to quantify the value it provides with a long-term vision, “so it is essential that the necessary resources be dedicated to take advantage of the benefits that personalized medicine has for science, the health system and of course for patients and their doctors.

For her part, María Laura García finds “many advantages” in this type of medicine since it allows the individual to be addressed as a whole and to offer treatments and clinical management more appropriate to their characteristics. “This is going to give patients a better quality of life,” she said.

In the current context of digitization and massive data collection, an infrastructure is necessary to support personalized medicine and guarantee its security. At this point, Fuensanta Bellvís commented that when creating a personalized medicine infrastructure “interoperability is important, but also the automation part.” Regarding data security, she also indicated that “it must be assessed whether the data should be anonymous or not, as well as taking into account that the data that is stored in the cloud is confidential.”

Daniel Quijada emphasized the solidarity that patients provide by providing their data for research: “without the patients of today, the patients of tomorrow cannot be cured.” Furthermore, although there is increasing awareness about the sensitivity of genomic data, Quijada noted that “we try to teach researchers which data can be shared and which should be protected.”

Training and financing

The rapid advance of personalized medicine in recent years was also discussed during the day, making it essential to ensure that health professionals are adequately trained and updated in the latest techniques and treatments. An example of this is Artificial Intelligence, a tool that “provides a lot of value” and complements the information for doctors to make a clinical decision, commented the QUIBIM representative. Something that María Laura García also agreed with: “training is key, but we must adapt it to each of the actors who are part of the system.”

However, investment and financing remains essential to continue moving forward. “We need more financing and investment in technology and human resources to address personalized medicine,” Quijada stressed.

In the final part of the meeting, access to the benefits of personalized medicine was discussed. Thus, Carina Escobar assured that “we continue to be conditioned by the postal code, which is why we must fight for it to enter the portfolio of services and for this access to be effective in all the Autonomous Communities.”

Finally, to encourage greater patient participation and education in relation to knowing what it is and how it contributes to personalized medicine, the president of the POP stated that patient organizations work on it, but that we need researchers, professionals, managers and decision-makers are aligned on this objective.”

The meeting was moderated by the director of the Servimedia news agency, José Manuel González Huesa and included the participation of the vice president of Clinical Studies of QUIBIM, Fuensanta Bellvís; the Scientific Director of the Ramón y Cajal Institute for Health Research, María Laura García; the manager of the Mentor program and member of the New Researcher Support Platform of the La Paz University Hospital Research Institute, Daniel Quijada; and the president of the Patient Organizations Platform (POP), Carina Escobar.

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