Support of medical care requires new skills related to effective control of applied medication and methods of treatment, elimination of mutually exclusive medical opinions. There are available technologies to facilitate continuous patient monitoring, including the generation of warning signals, enabling real-time decision support (at the bedside) as well as the ability to dynamically respond to emerging medical conditions and to personalise complex medical care. In the face of progressive digitization, which also involves medicine, acquiring skills, which are based on modern, advanced and state-of – the art computational and analytical techniques, is essential. During the HeartBIT_4.0 project, The Excellence Partners invited to the consortium, will train the staff from the Department of Heart Diseases of Wroclaw Medical University in the field of Data Science and application of Data Science techniques to medicine. The Department of Heart Diseases has no experience in using modern state-of-the-art methods of analysis and interpretation of large medical data sets. Due to the lack of these skills in the post-industrial era of Big Data and e-society, the Department is forced to accept a secondary role in the contemporary development of biomedical sciences. Establishing the consortium under Horizon 2020 twinning programme and thus formal cooperation with the leading scientific departments from the developed European Union countries that are experts in Biomedical Data Science will significantly increase the scientific potential of the Department. Moreover, the acquisition of the competencies described above will make the Department a valuable partner for future cooperation, research projects at the national and international arena. The acquisition of the above-described competences in cardiology will be the first step in implementing this approach in other fields of medicine so that the ultimate beneficiary of the HeartBIT_4.0 project will be the entire university.

Personalised medicine (PM) represents a paradigm shift away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the treatment and care of patients with a particular condition, to one which uses emergent approaches in particular technological areas such as diagnostic tests, functional genomic technologies, molecular pathways (etc.) to better manage patients’ health and to target therapies. Nowadays the challenge for national and regional authorities is to enable the shift from a REACTIVE healthcare system (based on episodic and acute care model) to a PREVENTIVE (stratifying at-risk individuals and ensure that preventive action is taken to intervene well before the onset of symptoms, let alone illness) and PREDICTIVE (leverage and integrate cutting-edge technologies to not only stratify risk, but even predict risk and intervene even further upstream) system – the so called Personalised Health (PH). In the face of this potential huge leap forward, the fact that personalised health lacks the cooperation and coordination needed to organise the still very fragmented field is a severe drawback to its development and to the placement of investments in an effective manner. For this reason, it is crucial to direct major efforts towards coordinating and aligning relevant stakeholders in personalised health action across Europe and beyond; create a participatory approach; build trust; enable a multi-stakeholder process; channel investments towards Personalised Health. All this considered, Regions4PerMed will coordinate regional policies and innovation programmes in Personalised Medicine and Personalised Health to accelerate the deployment of PH for citizens and patients. The project will reinforce the cooperation between H 2020 and ESIF on PH aspects; Strengthen industrial specialisation areas in Europe and allow PH to flourish as an Emerging Industry; Enable interregional joint investment on PH, including a stable link with Vanguard Initiative and with the European Innovation Council.

While Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the main cause of death worldwide, they are responsible for half of all deaths in Europe. The overall ageing of the European population and improving survival of patients with coronary heart disease has created a large population of older adults eligible for secondary prevention. Despite the established efficacy of cardiovascular medications, suboptimal adherence reduces their effectiveness and is the primary reason for suboptimal clinical benefit, contributing significantly to worsening of diseases and deaths at the population level. SECURE will be the first trial testing the efficacy of a fixed dose combination (FDC) polypill for secondary cardiovascular prevention in the elderly population (≥ 65 years old). The main objective is to evaluate the potential benefit of the FDC as a component of a cost-effective, globally available and comprehensive treatment strategy for secondary prevention of cardiovascular events (death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, stroke, and hospitalisation requiring revascularisation) as compared to standard therapy (the three components of the polypill given separately). As part of the secondary endpoints, SECURE will compare the effect of both strategies on adherence and intermediate measures of risk factor control such as lipids and blood pressure. Importantly, it will also measure the pharmacoeconomic impact of the FDC intervention as well as regional differences in all outcomes. The five-year project will thus involve subjects from seven different countries: Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. The findings and conclusions obtained in SECURE will allow the drafting of clinical guidelines and recommendations that will provide useful guidance and will serve as a reference framework for all stakeholders involved in tackling major challenges related to secondary prevention and treatment of chronic diseases in the elderly population.