IPM Take
Precision oncology is no longer waiting only for science. It is waiting for health systems to organise testing, reimbursement, referral and treatment access around the same patient pathway. The EFPIA paper is industry-led, so it should be read as a stakeholder position rather than neutral policy guidance. But the implementation problem is real: targeted medicines mean little if eligible patients are not tested, referred and treated in time.
Executive Summary
On 5 March 2026, the EFPIA Oncology Platform launched a white paper calling for better European coordination to improve access to targeted cancer treatments and biomarker testing. The paper argues that Europe faces persistent disparities in access to precision oncology and that scientific progress needs to be matched by coordinated action across policy, reimbursement, diagnostics, infrastructure and clinical implementation. It presents a practical implementation toolkit for Member States, drawing on case studies and policy levers intended to help scale good practice and reduce access gaps.
Why it matters
- Policymakers: Need to treat precision oncology as a pathway issue, not only a medicines issue, with testing, referral and treatment access planned together.
- Payers / HTA bodies: Should prepare for evidence and reimbursement questions that start before the drug, including biomarker testing, pathway readiness and timely access.
- Diagnostics / pathology: Need sustainable funding, workforce capacity and turnaround standards so molecular results arrive early enough to change treatment decisions.
Before precision oncology became central to cancer care, access debates often focused on medicine approval and reimbursement. That is no longer enough. For many targeted therapies, the access pathway starts earlier, with molecular diagnostics, pathology capacity, genomic interpretation, multidisciplinary decision-making and referral to the right centre or clinical trial.
What has changed now is that the access bottleneck has moved upstream. A patient may be theoretically eligible for a targeted treatment, but that eligibility only becomes real if the health system can identify the biomarker, report the result quickly, pay for the test, connect the result to treatment options and support the clinician in acting on it.
The EFPIA white paper presents this as a European coordination challenge. It highlights uneven access to biomarker testing and targeted treatments, and frames precision oncology as a delivery problem across the full pathway. That is politically important because fragmented implementation can deepen inequalities between countries, regions and hospitals.
For IPM, the strongest message is simple: Europe cannot claim to deliver precision oncology if testing and treatment are not funded, timed and governed together. The next phase of cancer policy needs to measure whether patients who are eligible for targeted care are actually identified and treated, not only whether innovation exists.
