Medicine is becoming increasingly personalized. Why is prevention still largely one-size-fits-all? At the GTIPA Annual Summit in Warsaw, Pietro Paganini called for personalized prevention to become a priority for European health innovation. Speaking during the session “Policy to Drive Life-Science Innovation in Europe”, he outlined how this approach could help people stay healthier for longer while opening a new frontier for European life sciences.
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In a nutshell:
- Prevention should be as personal as medicine. Tailor preventive action to individual biology, behaviors, and evolving health risks.
- Turn health data into earlier action. AI and wearables can support more targeted prevention.
- Reward innovation before people become patients. Make personalized prevention a European life-science priority.
Why Prevention Needs to Become Personalized
Cardiometabolic risk develops through interactions among genetics, metabolism, body composition, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and environment. No single food, nutrient, or behavior explains this complexity. Two people with the same body mass index (BMI) can have very different metabolic profiles and prevention needs.
Population-level recommendations provide a shared foundation. Personalized prevention builds on that foundation by considering individual differences and how they change over time. The question is how to translate this more detailed understanding into practical support for healthier lives.
How AI and Wearables Can Support Prevention
Healthcare often assesses health through individual snapshots: a medical visit, a blood test, or a blood-pressure measurement. Yet the factors shaping health change continuously as people move, eat, sleep, and recover.
Wearables, biomarkers, and digital tools can help track aspects of health over time. AI can connect these signals and help identify patterns that would otherwise be difficult to detect, potentially supporting earlier recognition of changes in cardiometabolic risk.
The value lies in turning those observations into reliable, actionable guidance. Collecting more data is useful only when it improves decisions. This requires validated tools, meaningful measurements, and evidence that the resulting interventions benefit people’s health.
Turning Health Information into Action
Knowing more about health does not automatically lead to healthier behavior. Habits, motivation, incentives, cognitive biases, and everyday environments influence the choices people make.
Behavioral science and neuroscience are central to personalized prevention. They can help translate information into interventions that people can understand, adopt, and sustain, whether these concern physical activity, nutrition, sleep, or sedentary behavior.
Personalized prevention should follow a continuous learning process: measure, predict, intervene, learn, and adapt. Preventive action should evolve as individual needs and responses change, alongside medical care and pharmacological treatment when needed.
Three Priorities for European Health Innovation
For Europe, personalized prevention represents both a public-health opportunity and a potential life-science innovation strategy. Three priorities can help make it a reality:
- Connect health data responsibly. Clinical information, biomarkers, and data collected over time need to work together, with privacy and security built into their use.
- Validate tools and outcomes. Wearables, algorithms, and digital biomarkers require rigorous assessment, alongside pathways that allow effective innovations to be tested and adopted.
- Reward prevention. Healthcare incentives should support interventions that demonstrate meaningful risk reduction, including before disease develops.
Europe brings together scientific expertise, established healthcare systems, medical institutions, and AI capabilities. Connecting these strengths around personalized prevention could create a distinctive opportunity for innovation.
The goal is to help people stay healthier for longer. Making prevention more responsive to individual needs should become a central part of Europe’s ambition for the future of health.