WG Clinical Interface & Social Impact
WG Clinical Interface is aimed at bridging the gap between promising results from research and development activities and real application world represented by key clinical operators and healthcare providers at European level. Expert clinicians enter the process by bringing in their know-how in terms of unmet clinical needs and scientific sponsorship of clinical trials.
Marzia Bedoni
Head of Laboratory of Nanomedicine and Clinical Biophotonics (LABION) at Fondazione Don Gnocchi
Chairperson
Maria de la Fuente Freire
Head of the Nano-Oncology Unit, ONCOMET, Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela (IDIS)
Vice-Chairperson
Benefits and challenges of this working group
Nanomedicine has a high potential to be a game changer in next-future medicine, being able to act at the right size scale in the body, more connected to the origins of real body functions than to bare molecular processes or macroscopic mechanisms.
Medical researchers are usually split into molecular medicine experts and on-field clinicians, sometimes generating a negative cultural gap between the two visions. Nanomedicine, for the reasons reported above, is a promising playground to link the two approaches, providing practical advantages both on diagnostics and therapeutics processes.
The main challenge for the clinical community in the nanomedicine field is to take the lead of the whole development process, being the protagonists both at the beginning – as unmet needs experts – and at the end, as representatives of the final market.
This important role requires, anyway, a concrete willingness to understand the roles and challenges of the other actors of the ecosystem, like bare researchers, companies, policy makers and public and private payors.
Past realizations & accomplishments
Here the main WG activities having led to positive achievements in the last period:
- Update of ETPN STRATEGIC RESEARCH AND INNOVATION AGENDA in terms of updated list of unmet clinical needs and in the larger perspective of ESTHER;
- FEDERATING the community of clinical centres potentially ready for nanomedicine clinical trials. An updated directory has been released;
- INTERFACING with other EU bodies: co-work done with ECRIN to map clinical centres;
Key actions:
- To drive the transition of our clinical centres community from bare nanomedicine to the larger world of healthcare technologies;
- To enlarge the community of the clinical centres “well educated to technology” in the corresponding European initiative (ESTHER), starting from the valorization of the clinical centres now involved in ETPN;
- To study the applicability of a perspective of value-based healthcare to nanomedicine, when applicable;