A Disruptive Dinner Guest

Healthcare in the EU would benefit from facilitating partnerships and innovation networks. These would encourage cross-disciplinary and cross-border collaboration in research and development using an “open innovation” approach. The goal would be to create and stimulate interface structures between academia-clinicians-industry in order to expedite research-based and patient-centred discoveries. This would improve tailored medicines and speed up patient access. Such a scenario would also allow for new levels of trust between the research community and participants and patients, the elimination of silos of single-use data and removal of country-specific gridlocks plus equal treatment of all health research data, including genetic information. Europe needs to encourage a systematic early dialogue between innovators, patients and decision-makers throughout all regulatory steps to provide guidance and clarity so as to avoid a disruptive scenario. Silos, as the authors will show, can often be counter-productive and stifle the appetite for innovation.