Precision Medicine: new prevention strategies – Interim results from Spoke 7. HEAL ITALIA Project

The HEAL ITALIA National Foundation, established through funding from the Ministry of University and Research under the PNRR, has the objective of generating new scientific knowledge and transferring it to the healthcare world in order to translate it into clinical practice, and thereby contribute to the fight against chronic diseases. At present, these diseases are still too often managed — both in terms of prevention and diagnosis and therapy — according to a “one size fits all” model that fails to account for the enormous individual differences concealed within groups of at-risk or affected subjects, who are labelled and treated in the same way when they should instead be stratified into distinct homogeneous subgroups, the so-called “endophenotypes,” to be managed in a well-differentiated and modulated manner according to biological and environmental characteristics at different stages of life.

This paradigm shift constitutes the principle of Precision Medicine, which must be appropriately applied also to the development of new Prevention Strategies. Spoke 7 of the HEAL ITALIA Programme has been dedicated to this objective, bringing together — under the joint supervision of the Department of Clinical and Molecular Sciences of the Università Politecnica delle Marche and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità — a multidisciplinary group to identify the determinants of individual risk of developing diseases with high impact on the health of the population, such as cardiovascular, oncological, endocrine-metabolic and rare diseases. The institutions that constituted the Spoke 7 working group, in addition to UNIVPM and ISS, are the Universities of Bologna, Catania, Foggia, Modena-Reggio Emilia and Roma La Sapienza.