MyPeBS addresses the crucial and timely question of the future of breast cancer screening in Europe. Indeed current standard mammographic screening, with entry stratified by age alone, has recently been largely questioned. Despite a demonstrated mean 20% reduction in breast cancer-specific mortality, together with reduction of late-stage disease in women older than 50, it is associated with potential harms including false positive recalls and over-diagnosis. Individual breast cancer risk estimation, through models including clinical variables, mammographic breast density and more than 100 genetic polymorphisms, now has substantial clinical and scientific bases. Personalized screening strategies, based on individual risk levels, could potentially improve the individual benefit/harms ratio of screening (earlier cancer detection and less intensive treatments in high risk women, less false positives and over-diagnoses in low risk ones), and increase the cost-efficacy for health insurances. MyPEBS will conduct an international randomized phase III trial to validate this hypothesis. It will primarily assess the ability of an individual risk-based screening strategy to be non-inferior, and possibly superior, to the standard of care screening, in reducing the cumulative incidence of stage II+ breast cancers. The trial, conducted in 5 countries (France, Italy, UK, Belgium and Israel) will include 85000 European women aged 40-70, all followed for 4 years. MyPEBS will also evaluate if an individual risk-based screening strategy, compared with the standard, reduces screening-related harms (unnecessary biopsies, overdiagnoses) in low-risk women, is overall at least as cost-effective as well as more accepted by women resulting in a larger screening coverage. After analyses of all components, the final objective of MyPEBS is to deliver recommendations for the best future breast cancer screening strategy in Europe.

Heart failure (HF) is the leading cause of hospitalisation in people over the age of 65 and carries a high cost to healthcare systems. It also exerts a significant economic toll on patients, their families and society in general; more the 15 million people are living with HF in Europe. Despite the considerable burden to human life and healthcare costs there has been scarce innovation in treatments in the past several decades: HF occurs mainly in the older population that may mistake symptoms as being the natural result of ageing and therefore not recognized until the condition has reached a severe stage. Poor management of HF increases the risk and frequency of acute episodes resulting in hospitalizations, poor quality of life and high burden on healthcare systems. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has evidenced that fearing to be infected, cardiovascular patients delay care. A state-of-the-art search indicated that that integrated care is crucial for improving the health care services, wellbeing and engagement through shared decision-making, education and support to self-management. Existing solutions are local and there is no common effective solution available in the market. Public procurers cannot go to open tender to deploy effective solutions for advanced heart failure. The TIQUE Consortium recognised Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) as the only way to stimulate the market to find a solution to the common problem. TIQUE will bring to the market new integrated care solutions implementing a predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory model of health care services for patients with heart failure. TIQUE will stimulate European industry to become a global leader in this innovative field. Use of PCP is of particular interest to the consortium members some of them are familiar with PCP and PPI and in using them strategically while others are new adopters. The consortium will proactively share PCP knowledge with the PiPPI and EURIPHI communities of practice.

The ambition of the CONNECARE consortium is to co-design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a novel smart, adaptive integrated care system for chronic care management. This will save European healthcare organisations huge sums whilst improving patient outcomes. The consortium contains all the necessary partners to ensure success. Based on the concept of 4P medicine, CONNECARE will provide decision support for the adaptive management of personalised clinical pathways and will deliver tools to monitor patients’ activities and status, thus empowering them and providing them with recommendations to self-manage their condition, resulting in substantial improvements in their quality of life. The three dimensions underpinning the required proposed paradigm shift are: 1. Organisational: making health and social care systems interoperable, promoting collaboration among care settings, and moving from institutional reactive care to a home-based preventive model. 2. Care and social services: addressing health risk prediction by combining already operational population-based tools with a patient-based five-dimension scoring strategy consisting of i) screening, ii) risk stratification, iii) mapping, iv) intervention, and v) surveillance. 3. Technological: delivering a CONNECARE system which leverages existing assets from partners to offer smart Adaptive Case Management, self-management and 3-level monitoring features, fully integrated with management systems in place. An iterative patient-centred co-design process will ensure a progressive refinement of model and tools, providing foundations for adoption and transferability. In addition, clinical trials will be held in three leading-light regions in integrated care uptake –Catalonia, Israel, and Groningen – to evidence improvements in outcomes and efficiency. Consortium members are active in the EIP AHA B3 Action Group; transfer of results to relevant stakeholders across Europe, beyond the stakeholders in CONNECARE, is guaranteed.

Female breast cancer is the most diagnosed cancer worldwide. In 2020, the International Agency for Research on Cancer estimated more than 2.26 million new cases of breast cancer. Early detection is crucial to survival; recovery rates approach 90% when detected in early stages. National population-based cancer screening programmes in Europe currently implement 3 standard imaging modalities: mammography, ultrasound and MRI. The downsides of these screening methods include ionising radiation, high costs and high false positive rates in screening results. Our multidisciplinary consortium of 16 partners from 10 countries aims to contribute to EU’s Mission on Cancer and Beating Cancer Plan by drastically improving the prevention, diagnosis and monitoring of breast cancer while reducing the burden on women and female patients and their families, health care professionals and others who are directly or indirectly affected by breast cancer. ThermoBreast proposes a new solution for accurate, harmless and non-contact screening, equally applicable for all age groups and breast densities and capable of detecting pre-cancerous states. This risk-free screening technology, recently patented by the project coordinator ThermoMind LTD, can detect vascular anomalies and asymmetry, caused by cancerous growth. It combines innovative screening through multiple sensitive infrared sensors with advanced AI analysis of temporal dynamic thermal patterns. Through its patient-centred integrated diagnostics approach, this project converges intelligent computer vision, blood vessel extraction and tissue analysis with advanced information technology to deliver a medical class 1 device that will be validated in an international multicentre clinical study. To enhance stakeholder participation, ThermoBreast involves end users, SSH experts and a patient organisation in the co-creation of the new screening solution and assesses its health and socio-economic benefits as well as its cost effectiveness. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on ‘Prevention, including Screening’.