Global health challenges, their related socio-economic implications and the future of medicine can only be efficiently addressed by international, inter-disciplinary collaboration.
The various topics of the plenary are structured in a manner to guide participants from future health challenges to possible solutions and required actions to address these challenges. Speakers are invited to present their view on the key issues described below.
Global health challenges and economic implications
What are the upcoming global health challenges and what are the economic implications of such challenges? Healthcare systems have no proper solutions in place to cope with these challenges and countries have no strategy how to finance healthcare under these expected developments. There is a need for new solutions.
50 year roadmap for the future of medicine
These new solutions may only be delivered by top level research and development. However several
paradigm shifts in the R&D and healthcare landscapes are required to occur: To change from a fragmented R&D landscape to multidisciplinary and international collaborative research: To take advantage of the “massive data” century; to change research focus from individual molecules to biological systems; to restructure medicine by establishing a mechanism/biological system-based disease taxonomy. This has several implications ranging from restructuring medicine from being a current organ-centered to a future on common disease mechanisms based medicine, new strategies in drug development and prescription, new organization of healthcare providers, to developing new curricula for education and training. These changes will be reflected in the 50 year roadmap. For more information, please visit http://www.globalsciencecollaboration.org/global-challenges/health
Frameworks for international collaborative research: technical, ethical and legal challenges
In order to allow such paradigm shifts, particularly to enable interdisciplinary and international collaborative research common technical standards, and harmonized ethical and legal frameworks are essential. This will be elaborated on the example of “massive data” –driven healthcare addressing challenges of common taxonomies, quality management, technical challenges, data protection and
privacy.
Role of academia and industry in health innovation
The paradigm shifts in the R&D landscape will also affect the academia-industry relationship. There is a need for increased collaboration between academia and industry particularly in the pre-competitive field. This will also impact on role of patents and open access information. Several examples of R&D partnerships in the precompetitive field will be presented.
Towards a global health science policy
Basically all of the above highlighted issues are of global nature requiring global collaboration for an efficient response. Therefore, the question arises whether the time is ripe for an international concerted action to develop the solution that will allow to respond to future health challenges and to sustainably
finance healthcare systems.