Personalized Medicine Consortium:

Big Science in a Small Country

Luxinnovation Conference:

Business Meets Research

26 May 2011

FOR NEXT GENERATION HEALTHCARE

2008 – Luxembourg Creates New Research

Program in Personalized Medicine

Luxembourg

• Luxembourg Centre for

Systems Biomedicine

• Integrated Biobank of

Luxembourg – IBBL

• Lung Cancer

U.S. Partner

• Institute for Systems

Biology (Seattle)

• TGen – Arizona Research

Centre

• Program in Personalized

Medicine – Consortium of

several U.S. centres

Small is beautiful

• Luxembourg has the potential to be a world leader in testing

and implementing new advances in personalized medicine into

its health care system

• 5 hospitals, no medical school, 1 university

• Small, but excellent scientific community – very collegial and

embraces partnerships

• Different Ministries work closely together on personalized

medicine initiative

• Ministry of Health believes that research will improve health

• Introduction of new innovation involves only one level of

government

• September 2010 – Leaders of the three Luxembourg programs agree to

support a major coordinated initiative in personalized medicine focused

on four priority research areas:

– Cancer (lung, colon, and breast)

– Type 2 diabetes

– Parkinson’s disease

– Large population cohort

• Agree to apply a systems biology approach to all research

initiatives in personalized medicine

• Coordinate activities through creation of a Personalized Medicine

Consortium to bring together all of the key stakeholders under

one umbrella

Evolution of Personalized

Medicine Consortium (PMC)

Organization of PMC

Cancer Diabetes

LNS

CRP-SantéPPM/CIEC

IBBL (TGen)

LCSB (ISB)

Parkinson’sDisease

HealthEconomics

Normal Cohort

PMC

Composition of PMC

• Leaders of each program in

personalized medicine

• Leaders from each major partner

• CIEC

• Health economics

• Laboratoire National de Santé

• US partners represented by their

Luxembourg partner

• IBBL accepts responsibility for the

budget of PMC and for coordination

• PMC meets monthly

• Decisions made by consensus

Personalized Medicine - Now

Hospital and

Pathology labs

Patient Doctor

Results

Diagnosis

Disease

Tissue

Examine

Treatment

Symptom information

Personalized Medicine – Future

Patient Doctor

Summary DataTissue

Examine

Molecular

Diagnosis

+

Recommended

Treatments

Molecular

Diagnostic lab

Best Treatment

Clinical Data

Data

Warehouse

Informatics

Centre

Data

Molecular

analysisDiagnosis

Components of Personalized

Medicine Initiative

1. Excellent, multidisciplinary research teams

a) focused on specific problems using systems biology

b) conduct the innovative research

c) coordinate the clinical testing of novel interventions.

2. Sophisticated technology platforms

a) collect high quality tissue and clinical data

b) high through-put technologies generate the large datasets

required by the teams.

3. State-of-the-art informatics

a) conduct informatics research

b) support the disease teams for data mining, data analysis and

model building.

Biorepository & Molecular

Diagnostic labs

Data

Warehouse

Informatics

Centre

IBBL and PMC

IBBL, PMC and Personalized Medicine

Hospital and

Pathology labs

Patient Doctor

Tissue

Treatment

Diagnosis

Disease

Results

Examine

Symptom information

PMC

Research

Team

Possible

Molecular

DiagnosisResearch

Results

De-identified

Clinical Data

Patient Data

Trusted

Third Party

(ebrc)

Discuss

Findings

Discuss

Findings

Molecular

analyses

Data

Mining

Research

Plans

Current Status of PMC

• Research teams created for cancer, diabetes

and Parkinson’s disease – cohort will be

organized by end of summer

• Cancer and Parkinson’s groups have defined

their research agenda – Diabetes has draft plan

• All teams looking for partners – both public and

private sector

Questions and Comments