New professional Master's degree programme in personalised medicine

The experts agree. Personalised medicine will play an even more pivotal role in the future, both in terms of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. Developments in big data and biotechnology over recent years pave the way for a healthcare system that is able to offer the individual patient personalised treatment. But if the great potential is to be utilised, there is a need for qualified professionals who can support and drive its development.

For this reason, over the past two-years Health has worked with the health science faculties at the University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University and the University of Southern Denmark, together with the Technical University of Denmark, to develop a professional Master's degree programme in personalised medicine.

Shortly before the end of last year, the new Master’s degree programme received final approval from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, and the programme will begin already in September 2021.

We must move forward together

The professional Master's degree programme is intended for both health science and technical and natural science graduates in the healthcare system, and for those in university research environments, public institutions and government agencies, as well as in the pharmaceutical industry. The goal is to ensure upskilling of the many professional groups at the same time, in order to move forward - both academically and in terms of sheer numbers - towards implementing personalised medicine in the healthcare system.  

Associate Professor and Consultant Britt Elmedal Laursen is part of the group that has been responsible for the academic development of the programme. According to her, cross-disciplinary collaboration is actually the focal point of it all. "It's not just a question of healthcare professionals acquiring new technical skills. First and foremost, we need to ensure a cross-disciplinary understanding so that different professional groups can talk and work together on new technologies and methods," she says, stressing that: "A medical doctor needn’t necessarily be able to do bioinformatics, but he or she must be able to understand the data and techniques on which the work is based, just as a bioinformatician or molecular biologist needs to have knowledge and understanding of the clinical workflow."

In this way, a bridge can be built from the basic researcher, who identifies a new genetic variant, to the engineer who develops new technical solutions for the medical doctor, who then prepares a final treatment plan for the patient. 

Basic module and data science placed at Health

The new Master's degree programme is being established as part of the Danish Ministry of Health's National Strategy for Personalised Medicine and is a unique collaboration between Denmark’s health science faculties.

The programme's modules and elective courses are spread across all of the five partner universities in order to include teaching staff from all over the country and to place the courses where the relevant expertise is. At Health, students will take the programme’s compulsory basic module, and the faculty also offers elective courses in data science.

About the degree programme

• The new professional Master's degree programme may be followed part-time over a period of 2-6 years and has an annual commencement of studies.
• It consists of 60 ECTS, corresponding to one year of full-time study.
• The programme consists of five compulsory courses that form the basis of personalised medicine, a Master’s project as well as two elective subjects, which give the students an opportunity to specialise according to their interests and needs.
• Applications for the professional Master's degree programme open on 15 January 2021. Read more and apply for admission at https://personligmedicin.ku.dk/

Contact

Associate Professor, Consultant Britt Elmedal Laursen
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Aarhus University Hospital, Department of Molecular Medicine and Department of Oncology
Email: britt@biomed.au.dk
Mobil: (+45) 2636 0992