The European Association of Systems Medicine "EASyM" aims to promote systems medicine approaches in medicine as well as in clinical and translational research. In connection with the DigiMed Bayern lighthouse project, BioM has recently become a member of EASyM. For the numerous participants of the "BioM Community", this EASyM membership and partnership will result in new, relevant access to a European "top network".
The personalized medicine should arrive fully in the clinic routine, instead of being implemented only in individual cases. To achieve this goal, increased cooperation of players in this field at regional, national and European level is essential.
The European Association of Systems Medicine "EASyM" aims to promote systems medicine approaches in medicine as well as in clinical and translational research. The predecessor of EASyM, "CASyM" (Coordinating Action Systems Medicine, FP7 funded), defined a first European roadmap for the implementation of the systems biology approach in medicine. For EASyM, systems medicine means significantly better understanding, preventing and treating illnesses through a holistic, integrated context, i.e. the "big picture". Key instruments are clinical medicine as well as the application of mathematical algorithms and models to multi-dimensional data of patients and healthy individuals. Systems medicine is thus a prerequisite to be able to draw medically relevant conclusions for individual patients from data mountains. These data include to a large part highly branched results on important molecular interactions and mechanisms.
With the light-house project DigiMed Bayern, BioM and the German Heart Centre Munich, have formed a "Digital Data Community" specifically aimed at one disease area as study case. Again, several high-ranking academic and clinical partners participate. "DigiMed Bayern" (runtime years 2018 to 2023) is dedicated to improving diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. With heart attack and stroke, this disease group is the deadliest in western industrial nations, including Germany. In complementary national programs, the Munich University Clinics and other Bavarian hospital sites are already in the process of trimming their infrastructure to "big data throughput".
The connection with a relevant European network is now a next stage of development.
Already in the years 2010 to 2015, BioM initiated and coordinated a large-scale project - the Munich Cluster Excellence Program "m4 - personalized medicine and targeted therapies". Local partners from clinical research as well as from the biotech and pharmaceutical industry participated. With equal parts from public and private funding, roughly 100 million euros flew into more than 60 individual projects and infrastructural measures in the Greater Munich area. Fortunately, the trustful cooperation of these partners has continued unabated even after the funding period. This continuously leads to a high number of cooperation projects with translation of research innovations into clinical applications.