PHG Foundation has been collaborating with organisations across Europe to create a ‘Personalised Prevention Roadmap’.
PROPHET.EU (A PeRsOnalized Prevention roadmap for the future HEalThcare) is a consortium of 18 organisations from countries across Europe working to build a roadmap for future healthcare, focusing on the use of personalised prevention.
The future of personalised prevention
The purpose of this roadmap will be to ‘support the definition and implementation of innovative, sustainable and high-quality personalised strategies that are effective in preventing chronic diseases’.
The project, expected to last for 48 months ending in September 2026, will identify current research advances in personalised prevention and, from there, design a framework to assess preventive approaches and their adoption into public healthcare.
Progress so far
As co-leaders of work package 2, we have now completed a scoping review to establish identified biomarkers suitable for the use in the prevention of common diseases. We then evaluated the evidence for clinical utility of biomarkers for use in personalised prevention with regards to cardiovascular disease. Our co-leaders in this work package, the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red (CIBER), have been undertaking the same work, but looking at evidence of clinical utility for biomarkers of cancer and neurological disorders.
At a summit held in spring 2024, Dr Chantal Babb de Villiers presented recommendations from our work on biomarkers for prevention of these common diseases. More than 70 health experts attended this online event to discuss the results of the mapping studies from the PROPHET.EU collaborators. The video of the summit is available to watch online.
The recommendations we made for the research agenda focus on improving research efforts in the area of personalised prevention, around three key themes:
Actions for research funders
Funders can support clinically relevant research by continuing to fund high quality biomarker research, translation and implementation studies; by encouraging inclusive evaluation and validation studies; and by developing approaches to prioritising implementation and translation research on biomarkers and the tests in which they are used.
Actions for researchers
Researchers can ensure that they develop a test definition for biomarker they are studying, to support further translational research; and continue to identify biomarkers using a wide range of ‘omics methods.
Actions around data tools, standardisation and integration
Both researchers and funders can explore machine learning to improve biomarker validation and development of risk prediction models, and standardisation of ML methods; further resources are needed to integrate data from multiple research areas (e.g. ‘omics) and domains (e.g. social, environmental) and integrate electronic health records into research, to allow a more holistic view of the usefulness of a test or biomarker for prevention.
In addition to the two reports already published, we will continue to engage with the project and contribute to the development of its strategies and recommendations. Our final output is expected towards the end of the project in 2026, when we will write a policy briefing summarising the key findings and recommendations from the project as a whole on the implementation of personalised prevention programmes within Europe.
If you would like to know more about this project, please contact Laura Blackburn.
UK participant in Horizon Europe Project PROPHET is supported by UKRI grant number 10040946 (Foundation for Genomics & Population Health)
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