The fifth annual NTA stakeholders meeting “Towards personalised medicine in Nordic clinical trials cooperation”, was held in Oslo 31 January 2017. It was opened by Lisbeth Normann, State Secretary at the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services. More than 85 people attended the stakeholder meeting that for the second year running took place at Hotel Bristol in the centre of Oslo. Ms. Normann followed up on the Norwegian Minister of Health and Care services, Mr Bent Høie’s, speech from the 2016 edition of the NTA stakeholders meeting and underlined the importance of NTA’s work, both in the past and the future. She then elaborated on Norway’s chairmanship of the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2017 and the programmes main goals, among them to further develop Nordic collaboration on clinical trials through Nordic Trial Alliance.
Before lunch, Dr Johan Nilsson gave a report on the NOS-M workshop on personalised medicine held in Stockholm in November 2016. Professor Dag Erik Undlien took the stage after him and gave an insightful presentation of Nordic Alliance for sequencing and personalised medicine, before the Swedish Life Science Coordinator, Anders G. Lönnberg talked about the drivers of life science development. The final speaker of the first part was Dr Andrew Roddam, VP & Global Head of Real World Evidence and Epidemiology at GlaxoSmithKline who gave an interesting talk titled: Looking at Norden from the global pharma perspective. See all presentations below.
After lunch Amy Mitchell from EUPATI–Norway and Lotte Klim from EUPATI-Denmark presented The European Patients Academy (EUPATI) initiative: How to increase patient contribution in medicines research, before Professor Steinar Aamdal from Oslo University Hospital gave his talk on Cross-Nordic participation in clinical trials. Jens Bjørheim, Chief Medical Officer at Ultimovacs, concluded the session with his view on how to faster integrate new technologies into clinical practice.
The final part of the day focused on Nordic clinical research projects and four speakers presented different perspectives. Dr Thomas Leth Frandsen from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, talked about Nordic clinical trials in a pediatric setting and Jarmo Hahl, the CEO of Medaffcon Oy’s talk was titled Real world evidence supporting health economic evaluations and market access – a Nordic perspective. Johan Askling from Karolinska Institutet presented the The Nordic Rheumatology Register Pilot, before Professor Morten Andersen from the University of Copenhagen ended the topic by discussing research on drug safety and effectiveness using Nordic pharmacoepidemiological databases.
Before Professor Jørgen Frøkiær, former chair of the Danish Council for Independent Research | Medical Sciences, summarised and concluded the ideas for NTA 2.0, the stakeholder meeting ended with a panel discussion moderated by NTA’s, Pierre Lafolie. The topic was future perspectives and priorities for Nordic cooperation on clinical trials and the panel consisted of Tiina Aaltonen, Finnish Cancer Association Siskot, Anders G. Lönnberg, Swedish Life Science Coordinator, Dr Andrew Roddam, Glaxo Smith Kline, Professor Johan Askling, Karolinska Institutet, and Professor Kjetil Tasken, Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM), Nordic EMBL Partnership & EATRIS.
See the full programme of the NTA 2017 stakeholders meeting
Se all presentations:
Johan Nilsson How to faster integrate new technologies into clinical practice
Dag Undlien Nordic Alliance for Sequencing and Personalized Medicine
Andrew Roddam – Looking at Norden from the global pharma perspective
Steinar Aamdal – Cross-Nordic participation in clinical trials
Jens Bjørheim – How to faster integrate new technologies into clinical practice
Thomas Frandsen – Nordic clinical trials in a pediatric setting