The increasing costs of health-care and unsatisfactory efficiency of the existing medical approaches create a high demand for targeted diagnostics and therapeutic treatments custom-made for each patient’s needs. P4 Medicine, which stands for predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory, aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine by focusing on predicting and preventing the apparition and development of a disease instead of focusing on treating the symptoms while personalizing the treatment to each patient’s needs if the disease appears. Highly participatory, it requires patients to work with their physician to understand their health status and how it is affected by their lifestyle and environment. Patients are experts in their own lives. With this, the demand for qualified researchers and physicians has arisen. A European Alliance for Personalized Medicine (EAPM) survey flagged up that lack of training and knowledge is one of the biggest barriers facing the full integration of personalized medicine today. Thus it is vital to develop training for future professionals in disciplines that are essential to the successful development of personalized medicine. As the 21st century progresses, blended learning has become an inevitable tool in higher education. An integration of selected and complementary face-to-face and online approaches and technologies, blended learning provides a higher quality learning, improved teaching, increased access and opportunity to the student. Inquiry-based learning has become widely recognized and advocated in higher education, especially in STEM programs. Inquiry-based learning is also a way for universities to link research and teaching, thus allowing students and researchers to interact more effectively compared to other educational methods and also making cutting edge research more accessible to students. The main objective of the PROMISE project is the design of new inquiry-based online teaching modules to familiarize students with P4 Medicine and its principles in order to transform and improve the existing teaching tools and practices in higher education (HE). Our teaching modules will be designed to give a jump start to students who wish to enter the field of research and train them into what we believe is the future way of practicing research and medicine. This new user-friendly format will allow translating excellence in science into excellence in higher education training in a format which could be easily transferred to a number of Universities in Europe and beyond. The PROMISE program will train 45 undergrad science and medical students who wish to pursue graduate studies. The PROMISE project will bring together cutting-edge research international experts from different fields of molecular, computational, and clinical biomedicine as well as experts in the field of responsible research and innovation (RRI) and SMEs specialized in the design of STEM curricula, and train them in order to develop teaching modules to transfer their research expertise to students. The students will engage in an interdisciplinary blended-learning program combining online and face-to-face interactions both with their teachers and peers. The consolidation of the learnings will come in the form of an interdisciplinary project aiming to solve current biomedical problems in an innovative and responsible manner. The project also aims to put students in contact with leading researchers in their field. Our modules cover currently one of the most important areas of research in a format necessary but not yet available.
The main objective of the PROMISE project is the design of new inquiry-based online teaching modules to familiarize students with P4 Medicine and its principles in order to transform and improve the existing teaching tools and practices in higher education. This educational intervention improved the existing teaching tools and practices in partner institutions. PROMISE teaching modules were designed to give a jump start to students who wish to enter the field of research and train them in the future of practicing research and medicine. Our design allowed rapid translation of cutting –edge science into excellence in higher education training in a format which could be easily transferred to a number of Universities in Europe and beyond.
Healthcare in Europe is undergoing fundamental shift towards integration of personalized, participatory, preventive and predictive methods and approaches towards better treatment outcomes and sustainable wellbeing. This, however has not been adequately reflected in the European study programs for future medical and biomedical professionals. In the survey coordinated by European Alliance for Personalized Medicine, it was shown that one of the biggest barriers for the full integration of personalized medicine in Europe is the lack of training and knowledge. This motivated us to create interdisciplinary partnership which could develop much needed training for future professionals in disciplines that are essential to the successful development of P4 medicine.