PARSIPPANY, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Personalized Medicine (PM) Connective announced the achievement of several milestones today. Jeff Waldron, Executive Director of the PM Connective, highlighted the developments, which include creating a new leadership panel, securing a second round of funding, and increasing brand awareness.
At the PM Connective’s Strategic Task Force Meeting in March, Waldron announced the formation of an Advisory Panel for the PM Connective to be comprised of senior ambassadors to help open doors and represent the organization externally. Peter Keeling, CEO of Diaceutics and Chairman of the PM Connective’s Board said, “We are pleased to announce that Peter Kapitein has agreed to serve as Chairman of our new Advisory Panel. Peter is the inspirational founder and leader of Inspire2Live, a Netherlands–based patient advocacy organization working to inspire patients, clinicians, and researchers to work together to get cancer under control by 2021 and to help people lead healthy lives in harmony with cancer. He will be recruiting 3-4 additional visionaries to join him on the Advisory Panel.
Kapitein described his passion that “personalized medicine has the capacity to transform healthcare, but we must always maintain the patient-centric focus . . . because our true success will be measured in health outcomes and the quality of life for patients and their families.”
Concurrent with the formation of the Advisory Panel, Waldron also announced that the PM Connective just received funding from Cardinal Health. Cardinal Health, a global, integrated healthcare services and products company, provides customized solutions for hospital systems, pharmacies, ambulatory surgery centers, clinical laboratories and physician offices worldwide, and ranks among the top 25 on the Fortune 500. They join Diaceutics as the inaugural funders of the PM Connective.
Tiffany Olson, President of Nuclear Pharmacy Services (NPS) at Cardinal Health and a PM Connective Task Force member, sponsored the funding. She explained, “Personalized Medicine has been talked about for decades, but it is unlikely to deliver on its original promise without rethinking how to deliver radical change. Therefore, the PM Connective’s disease-specific approach, combined with bringing together the silos of healthcare, will model that radical change, clinically and economically.”
Following on the heels of these two milestones, the just released March/April issue of the Journal of Precision Medicine features a pair of articles on the PM Connective . . . one introducing the background and mission and the second summarizing results from the initial workshops. Waldron emphasized, “These two articles in the Journal of PM highlight the progress the PM Connective has made through our first two melanoma workshops hosted by the Rutgers Cancer Institute. These daylong sessions featured collaborators from the major healthcare silos that collectively generated 19 key issues and melanoma interventions to be quantified in our proprietary valuation framework. We will define the benefits in both health outcomes and economic terms not only across all of the silos in aggregate . . . but also for each individual silo to ensure that our model for personalized medicine doesn’t disadvantage any stakeholder.”
This culminates a partnership with the Journal of PM that began last August when Waldron co-led a Roundtable on Overcoming Obstacles to Personalized Medicine at the Journal’s Precision Medicine Leaders’ Summit in San Diego along with Katie Johansen Taber, VP of PM for the AMA. The PM Connective will be participating in this Summit again on August 21-24 in San Diego.
Finally, in mid-February, the PM Connective attended the Melanoma Research Alliance Scientific Retreat in Washington . . . a premier melanoma gathering of key leaders from major academic, research, clinical, industry, and patient advocacy groups. At the pre-Retreat session for patient advocates and foundations, Jeff introduced the PM Connective and its unique mission. He explained “We are seeking to become integrators in personalized medicine starting with melanoma, which is highly curable if diagnosed and treated early. Our preliminary data shows prompt diagnosis and first-line treatment has the power to transform patient outcomes and dramatically lower healthcare costs as a result.”
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About the Personalized (PM) Medicine Connective
The PM Connective is a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit organization registered in New Jersey. Two hundred healthcare experts representing most major stakeholder groups conceived it in 2015. They convened in Dublin and set aside their competitive agendas to search for an answer to the question “how can we advance personalized medicine?” The consensus felt that disconnected stakeholders . . . each in their own silo . . . was restraining PM from achieving its potential. Thus, the PM Connective was launched as an unbiased facilitator to drive collaboration and integration across all healthcare industry silos. The founders felt it should be focused at the disease-specific level in order to produce a more implementable solution. After significant research, it was decided to begin with metastatic melanoma and to design a PM model with a corresponding valuation framework to prove the clinical and economic benefits of personalized healthcare.
