As personalised medicine enters clinical and public health practice, its wider implementation requires favourable health policies and a new health infrastructure. Personalised Medicine is expected to allow our current, largely reactive mode of medicine to be replaced over the next years by a personalised, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine. Europe has to provide citizens with access to emerging knowledge and technologies which will aid them in achieving a better quality of life over an extended lifetime. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been identified as one of the bottlenecks. Due to growing demands for data-rich, individualised medicine, ICT and healthcare are increasingly merging. As data-intensive analysis and computer-intensive modelling become common practice, this will result in a shift from personnel-intensive to ICT-intensive applications. Modelling will be used to generate “Virtual Patients”, such that each citizen might conceivably have a “virtual twin” that can be used to simulate and predict outcomes such as response to therapeutic or preventive interventions. To accelerate the development of personalised medicine, personal health and individualised healthcare global collaborations of researchers in academia, industry, SMEs, patient groups and regulatory authorities are needed, preferably as public-private partnerships, to ensure that research results are translated into tangible benefits for citizens.
