To ensure a patient-centric development and implementation of Repurposed medicines, patients must have a seat at the table, just like all other stakeholders involved. This means patients’ opinions, insights, experiences and expertise must be integrated into the medical or research process. Patient involvement in Drug repurposingstarts from working with patients as true collaborators and partners from early stages of the research, goes through Clinical development and implementation, and continues to market authorisation and post authorisation surveillance. Following this approach provides invaluable insight into the patients’ perspectives, needs, and preferences, which in turn has multiple benefits, such as:
- Guiding the decision-making process
- Enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of treatments
- Addressing real patient needs
- Fostering trust and transparency between researchers, patients, and their families
It is therefore everyone’s responsibility to empower, train and build patients’ capabilities to be able to join project discussions, and to enable them to advocate for their community. Similarly, to ensure a project’s success, other stakeholders like pharmaceutical companies or research institutions must build their capacity to be able to effectively work with patients.
The learning objectives of this module are to:
- Raise awareness on the significance of training patients
- Highlight the importance of developing a comprehensive Patient engagement strategy
- Bring to the fore the concept of treating patients as equal partners in any drug repurposing project