Founding of the m4 Personalized Medicine association
23.01.2015 15:21
On Thursday, January 22nd, the founding of the non-profit association m4 Personalized Medicine was decided. The aim of the association is to promote scientific knowledge in personalized medicine and to help bring this into medical application for the benefit of patients. The association wants to fulfill this task particularly through appropriate information and networking work.
“When breast cancer patients founded a patient-owned biobank with the PATH Foundation 13 years ago, no one was talking about 'personalized medicine'. Back then, breast cancer treatment was often overtreatment,” says Ms. Ulla Ohlms, chairwoman of the PATH Foundation and a breast cancer patient herself. The PATH Foundation is one of a total of 14 founding members.
The newly elected first chairman Dr. Thomas Werner emphasized that the association was continuing the interdisciplinary network that was established as part of the m4 A leading-edge cluster program has already been established in Munich. Research institutions and companies in the field of life sciences, as well as doctors from university hospitals, were represented in this network. The association now wants to include everyone beyond the borders of Munich who are committed to personalized medicine and want to organize close information and networking work. In addition, the network should be strengthened by other actors that are important for promoting personalized medicine, such as information technology and patient organizations. BICCnet, the Bavarian cluster for information and communication technology, and the patient organization PATH Foundation have already been recruited as founding members.
The cluster management organization BioM Biotech Cluster Development GmbH will initially also be the managing body of the association.