16.11.2017

Interview with Nicole Probst-Hensch by Anna Wegelin (both Swiss TPH)

Swiss TPH Personalised health from the public health perspective will be the focus of this year's Swiss Public Health Conference to be staged in Basel on 22 and 23 November 2017. In this interview, Nicole Probst-Hensch outlines the opportunities and risks of personalised medicine. She discusses the right balance between the protection of personal data and access to such data, and she sets out her principles as a researcher.

Swiss TPH: Personalised health is a hotly debated subject at present. Why is it attracting so much public attention?

Nicole Probst-Hensch: Approaches based on personalised health and personalised medicine can produce favourable effects on people, but they also harbour certain risks. So we shall be asking a number of questions at the conference: how can we utilise the personalised medicine method to arrive at a better understanding of the causal risks of diseases? What benefits does this method offer in terms of epidemiological research, and which structures does it require? We shall also ask: is our medical profession prepared to carry out personalised therapies? And will these therapies be deployed promptly in hospitals outside of the urban centres too? (Photo: Swiss TPH, Claude Giger)