Current concepts for disease treatment are changing rapidly, following recent developments in -omics technologies, which have markedly increased our capacity to describe an organism's biological makeup and the variability of individual characteristics at a global scale. In that context, the notion of personalised medicine/health has emerged as the next step for understanding, classifying, preventing and treating human disease, based on the integration of information from multiple sources, including genetic, genomic, and proteomic technologies, as well as environmental and lifestyle data, to generate a complex phenotype reflecting an individual's health and disease status. Using this type of information, models can be generated allowing the most accurate and cost-effective healthcare choices (for both prevention and treatment) for individual patients. Such models will shift clinical practice from a 

reactive approach, to a more pro-active andpre-emptive healthcare, with significant benefits for patients, physicians, national and European stakeholders.

 

In order to keep up with upcoming developments in medical research and to increase Greek competitiveness and innovation potential, we propose the establishment of a new Research Infrastructure for Personalised Medicine (pMedGR) at the Medical School of the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens. pMedGR objectives are well aligned with the Medical School's recent strategic development plans (see attached Decision of the General Assembly and executive summary) to establish a Core Bioresearch Facility (CBF), aiming at providing cutting edge technological services to support research and training of students  

and faculty. pMedGR will capitalize on the presence of top clinical research teams on topics such as oncology, endocrinology, rheumatology, autoimmunity, cardiology, infectious diseases & epidemiology/preventive medicine, including basic research groups of excellence on physiology, molecular oncology, molecular endocrinology, molecular biology, biochemistry, pathology, molecular pathology, pharmacology, microbiology and molecular epidemiology. The Medical School offers unique capacities for intensive clinical and biomedical research activities and is in an ideal position to lead developments in this field at a national and European level. pMedGR will support and integrate with ongoing international efforts, aiming at supporting research towards tailored healthcare interventions and robust models for prevention and treatment strategies.