ECGP was launched to improve cancer care

The European Confederation of Pharmaceutical Employers (EUCOPE) together with Exact Sciences, Guardant Health, Illumina, MSD and Novartis, have launched the European Coalition for Access to Comprehensive Genomic Profiling (ECGP), to improve cancer care through increased routine clinical access and reimbursement of Comprehensive Genomic Profiling (CGP) in Europe.

CGP is a tumor testing method that uses next-generation sequencing (NGS) to detect a major class of genomic changes and signatures in fully exonic gene regions known to promote cancer growth and identify patient eligibility for clinical trials, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy. Access to comprehensive genomic profiling in Europe is limited, with European cancer patients lacking access to potentially life-changing targeted cancer treatments because current funding and reimbursement frameworks do not allow routine testing for all relevant cancer mutations.

In line with the European Beating Cancer Plan initiative and the recommendations of the EU Mission on Cancer, EUCOPE advocates for public policies that support innovation, while fostering a community built around a common goal: improving and saving lives of European patients through innovative therapies and medical technologies, contributing to the vision of the Cancer Mission to improve the lives of more than three million people by 2030.

European Coalition for Genomic Profiling (ECGP): encouraging collaboration for personalized medicine

ECGP will engage key stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, pathologists and industry to identify and share best practices, and develop evidence-based policy recommendations about the clinical and economic utility of CGP for payers and other decision makers, based on a multi-stakeholder and multidisciplinary perspective .

“Our commitment is to lead and engage in partnerships throughout the treatment lifecycle to find actionable solutions that benefit patients, the healthcare system, our members, and society as a whole. ECGP will address an important access gap for European cancer patients and enable the shift of our healthcare system to personalized medicine,” said Alexander Natz, general secretary of EUCOPE.

Comprehensive genomic profile limited to Europe

Progress has been made in both genomic testing and the development of targeted therapies and immunotherapies for cancer patients over the last decade based on increased understanding of cancer and the impact of the individual genome makeup of each patient’s tumor.

Genome changes in a large number of genes can promote cancer growth. CGP can accurately detect these genome-relevant changes in a large number of genes compared to standard diagnostic tests which are narrow in scope and therefore have the potential to miss clinically relevant mutations.

ECGP said: “We have the ambition to provide the right treatment to the right patient at the right time – with the widespread adoption of personalized medicine, the potential is enormous to derive significant benefits for patients and the healthcare system along with more targeted use and efficient. resource. At present, these rapid technological advances are not fully adopted in clinical practice as patient access to comprehensive genomic profiling remains limited. While important progress has been made in making genomic tests based on single biomarkers or a limited number of genes available to patients in Europe – access to more comprehensive tests such as CGP is much more limited.”

In the coming months, ECGP said it would invite interested stakeholders to co-create solutions and advance CGP adoption with improved access for patients in EU Member States.