About

Policymakers, health care providers, physicians, patient and civil society representatives as well as partners and collaborators of the Instand-NGS4P EU funded project are cordially invited to save the date on their calendar and attend the forthcoming

High Level Seminar
“Precision Diagnostics for Precision Cancer Care –
Improving patient access to innovation”
at the European Parliament in Brussels on May 20^th, 2025 14:00 – 18:00 CET.

Why should you attend this event?

The High Level Seminar will highlight the medical need for innovative NGS in cancer care, as well as discussing regulatory challenges and health economic aspects.

Patient advocates can learn about the importance of NGS for their cancer treatment, and the efforts being made to meet their needs, such as including insights from pharmacogenomics when determining therapeutic options.

Clinicians will hear about the benefits of NGS and its role in precision cancer care, as well as current innovations to improve the provision of integrated standardized information from NGS for supporting therapy decision making at the bedside. They are invited to participate in highlighting the challenges facing its prompt and widespread availability, and how these can and should be addressed.

Policymakers, regulators and industry will come together with health care providers to discuss the technical, financial and regulatory obstacles currently facing the provision of timely and affordable access to precision cancer care across Europe.

Background

Providing the best possible therapy in a timely and accurate way to cancer patients critically depends on precision diagnostics. The more specifically medicines are selected to act on cancer, the more detailed diagnostic characterization of individual cancer tumors has to be performed to select the right therapy for the right patients at the right time.

In this context, next generation sequencing (NGS) has become a key diagnostic technology that should be available to newly diagnosed cancer patients throughout Europe. The rapid progress in the development of NGS technology allows comprehensive genetic analysis of cancers at affordable costs and in reasonable time. However, there are several challenges and hurdles in making innovative diagnostic solutions available to patients in health care.

Programme

This high level event will present lessons learned from the Pre-commercial Procurement Project “Integrated and Standardized NGS Workflows for Personalised Therapy (Instand-NGS4P)” (www.instandngs4p.eu), which is cofunded by the European Commission, and will discuss possible solutions on how to bring innovation to patients. The event will focus on three main issues to be introduced by short lectures and elaborated further in panel discussions, involving key stakeholders including patients, health care professionals, representatives from industry, regulators and policy makers.

• Medical need for NGS and precision diagnostics in cancer care
• How can innovative technologies meet regulatory requirements for in vitro diagnostics and how European standards can help
• Health economic benefits of NGS as prerequisite for cancer diagnostics reimbursement schemes. Addressingdisparities in accesstoprecisiondiagnosticsacross Europe.

Outcome 

A White Paper based on the conclusions of the event will follow with concrete proposals for future activities.