Towards personalized medicine in the EU: what is needed to facilitate the complex international clinical research?

Cancer is a major health problem in developed countries. Despite important progress, cancer remains a fatal disease. In Europe, cancer care is becoming less and less sustainable because it is not cost effective. Better treatments should be made available to patients. The biology of the disease should be known. Drug development should be based on methodologically robust clinical trials testing drugs selected on the grounds of convincing preclinical evidence. Personalized medicine will be established only if sophisticated clinical research is conducted, maximizing the use of recent technologies. Modern clinical research will request a strong partnership between industry and academics, with close contact with regulators and payers. European legal framework should be streamlined and simplified in order to become researcher friendly.