What is the Human Toxome Project? It’s a wide-reaching programme aimed at helping us to reconsider how hazard/risk assessment has been performed over the last 50 years on marketed substances like chemicals, cosmetic products, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, biocides and feedstuffs.

I co-chaired a session at the Commission’s ‘Innovation in Healthcare’ conference recently, and learned a very interesting lesson there that is overwhelmingly obvious, yet overlooked in our continuing mission to become one Europe.

In the last 30 years, biotechnology has become a major source of innovation in combating untreated diseases and improving current treatments. A better understanding of the human genome rests at the heart of this incredible technological progress. With the dawn of personal medicine, we are also witnessing the dawn of a new era in medicine.