Personalised medicine is rapidly gaining popularity worldwide, radically changing the traditional model of disease prevention and treatment. This happened due to a qualitative change in the ability to assess disease-causing changes at the molecular level.
Lithuania is at the beginning of this journey. The possibilities of the Lithuanian health care system to ensure high-quality disease prevention and treatment will become highly dependent not only on financial possibilities, but also on the ability to apply personalised medicine in practice. To achieve this, it is important to carry out biomedical research focused on personalised medicine, introduce new study programmes related to personalised medicine. In addition, it is likely that the aforementioned studies will not only accelerate the progress of the application of this new treatment model in Lithuania, but will also create prerequisites for the development of new biotechnological directions.
In order to create the most suitable model for Lithuania, it was necessary to carry out a detailed feasibility study, assessing the importance of the personalised medicine for clinical practice and the development of the research and innovation sectors. This feasibility study will become a basis for the development of the national personalised medicine strategy as well as the national research and education programme.
The study included a benchmarking exercise looking at the development and status of personalised medicine in eight countries (Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA), review of the EU context and opportunities around personalised medicine, co-creation workshops with the Lithuanian personalised medicine community, development of three scenarios and elaboration of one chosen scenario, incl. a roadmap of activities.
