Welcome to the third in the series Personalised Medicine, Ethics and the Market, a collaboration between the Centre for Personalised Medicine and the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. This year we welcome the Health Economics Research Centre as co-collaborators.

It is evident that healthcare services need to utilise advances in genomic technology and knowledge for the benefit of patients. The availability of new genetic tests as well as their use in healthcare is expanding rapidly and is being expedited by the 100,000 Genomes Project in the UK, however national coverage decisions for the integration of genomic medicine into the National Healthcare Service have been slow, complex and fraught with controversy.
The future delivery of genomic and personalised medicine within the NHS is integrally related to the health system process of priority setting and resource allocation within commissioning arrangements. The fair, equitable and appropriate commissioning of genomic medicine services requires rigorous exploration of the ethical, policy and practical implications.
Achieving appropriate integration of genomic medicine into healthcare will require full and proper consideration of multiple ethical and economic factors such as cost, opportunity cost, clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, need, ability to benefit and procedural fairness. The challenge in priority setting and resource allocation is to find a way forward giving these conflicting considerations appropriate weight in each case.

We invite you to join us at this conference, which will consider three broad themes:
· The Clinical Context: How should we understand current and future developments in clinical commissioning structures, organisation and delivery?
· The Health Economic Context: What are the current developments and trends in assessing economic evidence relating to personalised medicine?
· The International Ethics and Policy Context: What is the international ‘direction of travel’ in thinking about resource allocation related to genomic medicine?

Further information can be found at: www.well.ox.ac.uk/cpm/resource-allocation-in-personalised-medicine-conference