Drug development project empowers patients
Uppsala University, Sweden, and Swiss pharma giant Novartis are leading the PREFER research project under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
PREFER, or ‘Patient Preferences in Benefit-Risk Assessments during the Drug Life Cycle’, is a five-year scheme funded by the IMI, which is formed by the Horizon 2020 programme and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), to evaluate different preference elicitation methods and test them in a clinical setting.
Conny Berlin, global head of quantitative safety and epidemiology at Novartis Pharma, told The Pharma Letter: “We have put a lot of effort into building close collaborations between academic and industry researchers, health and technology assessment bodies, payers, regulators and patients to investigate how patient preference studies can best address everybody’s needs. We believe that PREFER will provide recommendations that can support the development of guidelines for industry, regulatory authorities and Human Tissue Authority (HTA) bodies for all medicinal products.”
Professor Mats Hansson of Uppsala University’s Center for Research Ethics and Bioethics (CRB) added: “Almost all decisions taken in research, trials and approval somehow affect patients, which is why we involve patients directly as partners in the PREFER project. We have also created patient advisory groups to make sure the project gets input from a wider patient community.”
The patient’s voice, alongside personalised medicine, is becoming increasingly important in the EU’s health circles, and not just for the companies that develop new therapies. The authorities that assess, regulate and decide which drugs are effective and cost-effective for patients and the community consider patient interaction equally vital to sustainable healthcare.
PREFER aims to provide systematic methodologies and recommendations to assess, engage and include patient perspectives during the development, approval, and post-approval of new therapies.
