ESH AL 2018 | European-wide MRD screening should be available for all

Every patient in Europe should have equal access to state-of-the-art diagnostics. Now obviously that’s not going to be in their hospital; to be very schematic and over to oversimplify, I work closely with a group called EuroMRD which emanated from one University, at Erasmus University. Jacques van Dongen created EuroMRD thanks to EU concerted action funding, and that should not be forgotten; we tend to forget what Brussels does for us. And because of these concerted actions over a series of programmes, we created a group that has been in existence for over 20 years and which aims to standardize and to optimize, and we, as a rule of thumb, we reckon that you need one MRD lab for 10 million inhabitants. So you can do your sums; there’s, let’s say 500 million people in the EU, so that would mean 550 labs for ALL. but that’s a rare disease. And what should we do at the European level and what should we do at the national level? I think it’s just a little microcosm of Europe; some things should be done at the national level and some need European level management. But it mustn’t be, it shouldn’t be you only get state-of-the-art MRD management if you live near or if you happen to be managed at a big university center.