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The new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Personalised Medicine held its official launch event in the House of Commons today with Life Sciences Minister George Freeman.

The Group aims to help the NHS and patients make best use of the increasing availability of cutting-edge technologies to provide more personalised health and care.

The PHG Foundation, an independent health policy think tank that aims to make science work for health, provides the Secretariat for the new Group, supported by partners the Northern Health Science Alliance (NHSA), the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the BMJ.

NHSA Chief Executive Dr Hakim Yadi said: “Personalised medicine is the future of the NHS – it is a new better form of healthcare which treats the patient as an individual.

“The North of England, through its excellence in research and innovation, is playing an integral part in developing personalised medicine exploring its potential for patients and the NHS.”

Over a hundred stakeholders from the patient community and the clinical, research, policy and commercial sectors joined parliamentarians led by the Group’s Co-Chair Lord Norman Warner to discuss the nature of personalised medicine and implications for the NHS.

APPG Chair Jo Churchill MP said: “As a two time cancer survivor, personalised medicine has been a dream of mine and I am so keen to move this APPG forward…Working closely with my Co-Chair Lord Warner, and the other parliamentary officers and members, I believe this Group will provide a much-needed forum, for productive discussion and insightful debate, on how personalised medicine offers us opportunities to provide a more efficient and effective NHS”.

Delegates heard from distinguished speakers Prof Peter Johnson (Chief Clinician, Cancer Research UK) and Prof Hugh Watkins (Head of the Department of Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford) on the benefits of personalised medicine for cancer and cardiac patients. There were also be demonstrations of some of the innovative technologies that could help deliver better, more tailored patient care in the near future, including a pocket-sized DNA analyser, a medical 3D printer, a mobile ECG device and a patient-controlled medical records portal.

The NHSA acts as a portal for funders and investors to access the expertise of the N8 universities; Newcastle, Leeds, Lancaster, Sheffield, Durham, York, Manchester and Liverpool; four Academic health science networks and eight research intensive NHS Hospital Trusts.

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