Groundbreaking Project Will Help Combat Major Diseases

A groundbreaking European project launched next week and led by the University of Plymouth will help to combat major diseases such as cancer and brain diseases. The four-year project, which involves 31 institutions across Europe, will be launched in Milan on Friday 9 July, when the first workshop takes place.

The projects’ key aim is to tackle and reduce fragmentation in the new field of biopattern and profile analysis. (A biopattern is the basic information ie pattern that provides clues about underlying clinical evidence for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. A bioprofile is a personal fingerprint that fuses together a persons’ current and past medical history, biopattern and prognosis.)

Speaking about the project, Emmanuel Ifeachor, Professor of Intelligent Electronic Systems at the University of Plymouth, said: “The grand vision is to develop a pan-European, coherent and intelligent analysis of an individuals bioprofile; to make the analysis of this bioprofile remotely accessible to patients and clinicians, and to exploit the bioprofile to combat major diseases such as cancer and brain diseases.”

Biopattern brings together leading researchers in medical informatics and bioinformatics from academia, the healthcare sector and industry in a new way, harnessing expertise and information to put Europe at the forefront of eHealth. The project aims to identify how bioprofiles could be exploited for individualised healthcare such as disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment.

Leader of the Evaluation Task Force of Biopattern, Dr Elia Biganzoli from the Unit of Medical Statistics and Biometry of the National Cancer Institute, Milan, said: “We are delighted to be hosting the first event for the Biopattern project with partners across Europe.”

We see the key benefits of the Biopattern Network of Excellence in the multidisciplinary approach for bioprofile analysis. The synergy from joint efforts of researchers from different fields is needed to offer the EU citizen a realistic perspective of the improvement of patient care trough the exploitation of biopatterns.

For more information, please contact Samantha McKay, Public Relations Assistant, on +44-1752-233981, E-mail: publicrelations@plymouth.ac.uk