FIMM impact

This takes many different forms, with major target areas including:

• delivery of individual patient diagnostics and therapeutic recommendations in cancer
• delivery of medical imaging and AI-based pathology both locally, and through mobile microscopy and cloud computing, globally
• delivery of accurate genomic diagnostics in rare disease
• delivery of the public health promises of genomic prediction.

Stakeholders range from our direct clinical colleagues and patients in Helsinki, to the government and population at large, and in some cases to global impact in public health. Each of the three major research areas are directly focused on public health impact, so we consider societal impact a direct goal, rather than indirect benefit, of all FIMM research.

FIMM is also deeply committed to contributing to society through public engagement. With the ever-increasing public interest in personal health and genomics, we feel that these activities have become increasingly important. During the past few years, we have been gradually increasing the amount of our outreach and communication activities and focused significant efforts on building a strong online and media presence. Each year, we have hundreds of national and international visitors representing academia, industry, policy makers, patients and high-school students. 

FIMM research output will help patients receive more effective drugs; provide new tools for digital pathology; develop and deliver diagnostics and predictors of disease outcome and therapeutic response; and introduce public health recommendations driven from epidemiological and genomic insights.

Thanks to our long-term efforts and relationship building, the magnitude of industrial collaboration projects and their impact on FIMM funding have been steadily growing. Our grand challenge programmes have developed several successful research collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry.

Our main motivation for establishing collaborative research projects with industry stems from the fact that together we are stronger. Both industry, academic researchers and patients benefit from a successful public-private partnership. We at FIMM, with our key collaborators, are able to quickly provide answers to many problems that industry is currently not equipped to answer alone and thus can accelerate the product development process. At best, this can mean getting a new medication or a diagnostic test to the market faster for the benefit of the patients.