The #ECHoS consortium has the potential to bring the #CancerMission spirit, vision, and ambition to the Member States and at the societal level, very close to citizens. But only by understanding people’s needs and involving them in research and the immediate implementation of research results can we achieve better results than before.

We need to work together to generate and maintain a new mindset regarding cancer research, as well as the way prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment services are delivered to citizens and patients. Research should no longer be viewed as a luxury but as a critical part of cancer control in the 21st century.

The national hub structures must take into account the specificities of each country (or even the local or regional specificities), and cultural and social factors. Still, there will always be a common thread connecting them all, ensuring coordination, multi-directional dissemination of good practices, and continuous feedback mechanisms aimed at continuously improving quality.

We have the opportunity to generate unique, disruptive, and adaptive impact models, as they have never existed before, based on mapping, activating, and involving traditional and non-traditional stakeholders, in an approach to cancer as a societal problem.

An essential role will be played by specialists from non-traditional areas as well: social sciences and humanities, science communication, social innovators, digital media analysts, and so on.

In the complex picture of cancer, oncology research, and European and national initiatives (dozens of research projects approved by the EU in less than 2 years), we need a new type of leadership (distributed leadership; leadership as a process) to respond effectively.

Trust is a key word when considering new possible leadership models and when thinking about effective models for involving citizens in #CancerMission. It is essential to understand the mechanisms by which people’s trust is formed (in doctors, healthcare systems, decision-makers, or trust at the societal level), as well as their attitudes and perceptions of cancer, in order to create new, personalized models of communication, education, and engagement.

The atmosphere at the Grand Hotel Stockholm lobby during the Nobel Week Dialogue was nothing short of magical. As I entered the hall, I was immediately struck by the sense of history and intellectual prowess that enveloped the room.

Under the glow of elegant chandeliers, the air buzzed with anticipation, excitement, and the electric energy of intellectual exchange. The lobby was filled with an extraordinary gathering of some of the brightest minds in the world – Nobel Prize laureates, casually sipping coffee, engaged in animated conversations that spanned the realms of science, literature, and peace. The hum of passionate discussions resonated throughout the space, filling the air with the amazing scent of discovery and innovation.

As I stood there, taking in the awe-inspiring scene, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of gratitude and humility. To be in the presence of such remarkable individuals, including the legendary Dr. James Watson, was an experience I will never forget. Surrounded by the spirits of past and present Nobel laureates, I was reminded of the power of curiosity, the importance of perseverance, and the boundless potential of the human spirit.

That unforgettable encounter with Jim Watson amidst the grandeur of the Grand Hotel Stockholm lobby will forever remain etched in my memory.

On this 70th anniversary of the DNA double helix discovery, I am grateful for the opportunity to have shared a moment in time with one of the greatest scientific minds of our age and to have firsthand experienced the enchanting atmosphere that unites those who have shaped our understanding of the world.

On a cold 2012 December day, I had the honor of attending the Nobel Week Dialogue in Stockholm. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to have a personal interaction with one of the most legendary scientists of all time, Dr. James Watson. As we sat down for a one-hour discussion, I was humbled and awestruck by his passion, wisdom, and humility.

That day Jim recounted the incredible journey he and Francis Crick embarked on 60 years prior culminating with the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

As we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of this groundbreaking discovery, on this day, April 25th, I am filled with emotion and gratitude. Their perseverance and dedication unlocked the secrets of life, paving the way for countless innovations in medicine, agriculture, forensics, and more.

Jim explained to me the implications of his and his colleagues discovery, which has since transformed our understanding of life and its intricacies.

As I reflect on that extraordinary encounter with Jim Watson back in 2012, I am struck by the profound impact that one discovery has had on our lives. The double helix has woven its way into the fabric of our existence, shaping our understanding of the world and ourselves.

One of James Watson’s most famous quotes, reflecting his curiosity and passion for scientific discovery, is: “The important thing is to never stop questioning.” This quote encapsulates Watson’s approach to science and his relentless pursuit of knowledge.

On this 70th anniversary, we honor the legacy of James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, whose relentless pursuit of knowledge illuminated the secrets of life and inspired generations to come.

The DNA double helix discovery laid the foundation for one of the most ambitious and transformative scientific endeavors in history: the Human Genome Project. This international collaboration, launched in 1990, aimed to map the entire human genome by identifying and sequencing the 3 billion nucleotide base pairs that constitute our DNA. The project sought to unravel the complexity of our genetic blueprint with the ultimate goal of improving our understanding of human biology, health, and disease.

Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project stands as a testament to the power of international cooperation and the relentless pursuit of knowledge. This monumental achievement has opened up new frontiers in genomics, personalized medicine, and our understanding of the intricate interplay between genes and the environment. The project has accelerated the discovery of disease-causing genes, paved the way for novel diagnostic tools, and informed the development of targeted therapies tailored to an individual’s unique genetic makeup.

Dr. James Watson’s impact on the field of genetics extends beyond the discovery of the DNA double helix structure and his involvement in the Human Genome Project.

In 2007, Watson became the first person to receive his fully sequenced genome as part of the Personal Genome Project, led by Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School. The project aimed to advance personalized medicine by sequencing the complete genomes of volunteers and making the data publicly available for research purposes.

Receiving his sequenced genome was a poignant moment for Watson, marking yet another milestone in his storied scientific career. The sequencing of his genome demonstrated the remarkable progress made since the discovery of the double helix, as well as the increasing accessibility of genomic information.

Watson’s willingness to share his genetic data emphasized the potential of genomics to transform medicine and our understanding of human biology.

The sequencing of Jim Watson’s genome has also raised important ethical questions about privacy, consent, and the potential consequences of widespread genomic data sharing. These discussions have contributed to the ongoing conversation about responsible genomics research and the development of appropriate regulations to protect individuals and communities.

As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the double helix discovery, we must acknowledge Dr. James Watson’s enduring influence on genetics and genomics, from the foundational discovery of DNA’s structure to the ongoing pursuit of personalized medicine. His lifelong commitment to advancing our understanding of the human genome continues to inspire researchers and pave the way for a future where genomic knowledge benefits us all. The double helix has forever changed our world and it is our duty to ensure that the progress.

… I am Marius Geanta, MD, President and Co-Founder of the Centre for Innovation in Medicine, and Medical Director of McCann Health Brain & Heart.

• the fight against a pathogen not yet fully known, the fight in which unprecedented financial, human, and scientific resources were thrown into the game
• the challenge of dealing with a large number of patients with chronic diseases that no longer had access to the hospital (the healthcare systems in Eastern Europe are centered on in-hospital care) and for which solutions had to be found, especially in 2020

The introduction of telemedicine overnight (after years of procrastination) represented a step forward, but an incomplete one, in the absence of integration with other data sources: electronic files, wearable devices, or other mini devices used at home by chronic patients, to monitor the evolution of the disease.

It’s very important that the investments and prioritization for Covid-19 offered important results – vaccines, diagnostic tests, oral treatments, etc., but one effect was the deprioritization of patients with chronic diseases – cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes patients, and the list can go on and on.

The data are eloquent: hundreds of thousands of excess deaths in Eastern Europe in 2020-2021, two-thirds of which represented excess mortality as a result of uncontrolled chronic diseases.

It is clear that the solutions identified in the pandemic crisis, such as telemedicine, have not reached their potential. There are multiple reasons for this.

(1) Probably the most important reason is the inertia and reduced adaptation to change of medical doctors, but also of patients, even in a crisis situation.

(2) During the pandemic, there was no standardization of the use of digital solutions such as telemedicine. For example, a law was promoted during this time, but the application rules were published only last week in Romania.

The next step is the professional’s opinion, for each therapeutic area, regarding when, and how telemedicine should be used. For this, we probably need pilot projects, implementation research, and real-life use of various digital tools, with the aim of increasing the quality of life of patients.

Creating models based on real life is essential for increasing trust (of people in technology, but also of patients in doctors and the health system) because it takes into account cultural, social, and environmental factors that influence attitudes, perceptions, and individual behavior.

The pandemic has shown us how important individual behavior is in relation not only to classic public health measures but also in relation to innovations – mRNA vaccines, genomic surveillance of virus circulation, the use of the Covid-19 digital certificate or the use of applications that signal proximity to an infected person.

I think there are lessons from the pandemic that we are still learning – and one of them is that innovation and the digital component of innovation must start from our needs, but also take into account individual behavioral elements. Without these elements, digitization and innovation will remain at the stage of buzzwords.

The version in Romanian: Telemedicina, una dintre lecțiile pandemiei Covid-19 pe care încă nu am învățat-o în România

There is no greater barrier against innovation than searching and inventorying good practices from everywhere and trying to implement them as such, without nuance, in completely different social, economic and cultural environments.

Indeed, there is no greater barrier. What does exist, however, is a direct and imminent threat to innovation: babbling on the subject of innovation, stemming only from the desire to join the buzzword trend. This chatter is more toxic than disinterest in innovation.

Many walk around with a death grip on the word innovation, not willing to let it go no matter what, like a pit bull with its teeth stuck in a rubber bone. One might get the impression that we live in a world so advanced that it is able to manage pandemics, wars, energy and financial crises, even if they were, say, all compressed and superimposed in two years.

But hey, how come this world, inebriated with words, convinced that it is innovating, did so poorly in managing this unfortunate superposition of catastrophes? How come it strives to act just like before? How come it aspires to return to the old “normal”, thinking that this will save us all?

Seems too much like the scenes before the sinking of the Titanic, when people were having fun, singing and dancing, even though the ship was already taking on water, doesn’t it?

In times like these, you need genuine ideas and leaders or you collapse as a society, organization, or system sooner or later. Nothing needs to be proven on this point, had you opened a history textbook at least in middle school.

“Marius, my dear, the world lacks big ideas”, a great man told me, you can find him in many books on the history of medicine, despite the efforts of his successors to minimize him, to reduce him to the lowest common denominator.

The lowest common denominator – this operation was supposed to remain only in math books, not turn into a mass operation, applied at the level of society, school, corporation.

If you are educated in the spirit of values that have crossed the millennia, it is difficult for you to understand how the world can function without authentic leaders and without big ideas, from one day to the next, like a mad race from nowhere to nowhere.

People and their wonderful ideas are needed to move the world forward, to keep fixing the horizon line further and further, to inspire people (and above all children and young people, who need more than ever of authentic landmarks) and make them understand the higher dimension of us as a species.

Otherwise, living from festival to festival, disinterested in science, innovation and big ideas, aren’t our lives reduced so much that we are practically witnessing an involution on the scale of humanity?

Our history is actually a succession of terrible ups and downs, from which we have emerged each time with our own vision, ideas, leaders and names. That’s how Apollodorus went down in history, not Gabriel of Damascus – you get the point, and the examples abound.

There’s still a chance, as long as there are still people who have access to the news about the rovers exploring Mars and whose names are banal – Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance – when they could be called Let it go, little brother (in Romanian, Las’ că merge și așa, frățioare, a saying that means that you shouldn’t put too much effort in a specific task, as long as it’ll do the job at least once).

The first CAR-T therapy approved is indicated in some severe forms, for which there were no other treatment solutions, leukaemia (in children) and lymphoma (in adults). The T cells of the cancer patient were extracted from the body, genetically modified in a specialized laboratory outside Romania, after which they were transported back to the hospital and administered in a single infusion to that person.

Success rates are remarkable, and in many cases the survival of more than 10 years (the case of Emily Whitehead, the first child treated in this way in the first clinical trials in the US) leads us to think of a cure for otherwise lethal cancers in the short term.

It sounds like science fiction for an Eastern European country, but it has been happening for a few weeks in Romania, under the coordination of professors Anca Colita and Alina Daniela Tanase, who deserve all our applause.

CAR-T therapies are considered the most sophisticated therapies, being at the same time cellular therapies (using cells of the immune system), gene therapies (involving genetic modification) and immunotherapies (activating the immune system, which resumes to fight cancer effectively).

It is a proof that the East-West divide in Europe can be narrowed by using innovations. Romania is currently going through a very interesting period in terms of the national cancer agenda: on 31th of May, the Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said that “the implementation of the National Beating Cancer Plan will make us move to personalized medicine”, after in January, the President of Romania, Klaus Werner Iohannis, launched the Romania’s Beating Cancer Plan (perfectly aligned with the European vision and initiatives). Last but not least, there is a strong political consensus in the Romanian Parliament to approve the Cancer Law (which on 1st of June entered the line of submission for debate).

We must have the courage to express our needs, but also to explain and describe our strengths based on a deep understanding of local realities.

No one knows better than us what needs to be done, although it is true that we have to learn from Western partners how to implement it.

We must take our place at the table of decisions, influencing prioritization of European funds and implementing the necessary reforms.

Innovation, understood in oncology primarily as personalized medicine, must reduce these inequalities.

The implementation of innovation (from prevention and screening to diagnosis and treatment) without innovating in implementation will lead not to the reduction, but to increasing inequalities.

In Romania, we have done our job in terms of cancer policy: the National Plan was launched by the President Klaus Iohannis in January, the Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said yesterday that “the implementation of the Plan will make us move to personalized medicine”, and there is political consensus in Parliament necessary to approve the Cancer Law (which today entered the straight line of submission for debate).

No other European country has such an alignment at the highest level, endorsed by the professional environment and civil society.

We have enough arguments to consider Romania a model for real-time translating European cancer policies (including Cancer Mission) into national policies; I am confident we can promote this model of collaboration without hesitation, with confidence and pride.

This is the synthesis of my today’s (May, 31, 2022) speech at the high-level meeting organized in the Romanian Parliament by Senator Nicoleta Pauliuc, the initiator of 3 laws (so far) for the benefit of cancer survivors.

In the meantime, more and more people and organizations need us, and we enjoyed and enjoy every partnership, every project, every friendship.

Centre for Innovation in Medicine aimed and succeeded to be a place where we learn continuously, where we attract smart and curious people, where we build long-term projects and catalyze partnerships for the benefit of citizens.

We have often managed to explain the inexplicable, to unite points of disunity and to become, consequently, an independent, equidistant and transparent platform for dialogue on the most complex topics in health, becoming a relevant stakeholders at national, regional and European level.

Today’s anniversary finds us with a multinational team, physically present in many corners of the world, connected to such an intense flow of activity that we hardly realized that today we must stop a little, to congratulate ourselves for what we have achieved so far and to encourage ourselves for what follows.

The Centre for Innovation in Medicine was initially an urgent need. But then, InoMed became, at the same time, a dream and a reality.

We live this dream and the reality simultaneously with the intensity and the certainty that what is best for all of us, the citizens, is yet to come.

If we’re looking at the vaccination against Covid, despite the immediate availability of the vaccines (on December 27, 2020), for the entire eligible population, Eastern European countries are considerably behind the European average rate of vaccination with two doses; the gap increases if we take into account the administration of the booster.

In Eastern European countries that are not members of the European Union, such as Moldova and Ukraine, vaccination rates against Covid are lower than the average rate of vaccination in EU member states from Eastern Europe.

European Immunization Week is an opportunity to bring to the fore the issue of inequalities, the East-West divide in vaccination: both anti-HPV and anti-Covid.

The Berlin Wall, which has divided Europe for decades, fell in 1989. In terms of vaccination, the Iron Curtain still persists, after decades in which Eastern European countries have either become EU members or are on their way to EU membership.

The standard of living has risen every year, GDP has risen steadily with the shift from centralized to liberal economy and globalisation, but public health lags behind the other socio-economic sectors, despite the fact that public health is a prerogative of the EU, not of the Member States.

In recent years, we have contributed to the European Commission’s Cancer Initiatives (BECA, Cancer Mission) by trying to explain inequalities from the perspective of the citizens and of the civil society institution that takes the daily pulse and understands the deep realities of Eastern society.

Reducing these inequalities is possible by including in the research, local, cultural, specific and common factors of many CEE member states, which determine people’s attitudes, perceptions and behavior, including in relation to vaccination.

This change of mindset is possible, and the European Commission and HADEA have already created through the 2022 Calls of #EU4Health and #HorizonEurope, the framework for potential implementation of truly innovative projects aiming to increase the vaccination rate, both against HPV and against Covid. It remains for these projects to be selected, funded and well implemented.

Dear EU Leaders, please tear down this Iron Curtain of vaccination.

If we have not learned the lessons of history, can we learn to live with SARS-CoV-2 and, worse, can we learn with the perspective of a long-term war?

Beyond the questions, more or less rhetorical, are the people. With their dramas, delusions and dreams. Many, interrupted by an invisible enemy or by one as obvious as possible.

We start the ReThink Health project having in mind the citizens and the right to high-level health and care. We have in our hearts and minds people who are suffering now, in Ukraine, as well people who have suffered (in the CEE more than in other EU MS) because of the pandemic, but as well people who, because of the dysfunctions of public health systems, have been suffering in silence for decades with chronic diseases in Kyiv, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia or Bucharest.

People’s chance at life or a higher quality of life should not depend on the postal code.

We are active and we have developed in-depth analysis and knowledge on the East-West inequalities, as we have a long history of over a decade of understanding how health innovations can reduce inequalities.

Innovation as a cohesive factor in the EU is our headline at the Centre for Innovation in Medicine. And the premise is to build forward better.