In a nutshell. Medexpress news digest - 31.03.2023.

The law on the National Oncology Network has been signed by the President. The main goal of the new legislation is to ensure that every patient, regardless of where they live, has equal access to coordinated and comprehensive oncology care. As Andrzej Duda pointed out, work on issues related to improving health care for the treatment of oncological diseases has been ongoing since the beginning of his presidency.

The Senate has rejected the Health Care Quality and Patient Safety Act. The position on the issue was supported by 50 senators, with 44 against and 1 abstention. Objections to the bill were raised in the debate by the chairwoman of the Health Committee and the bill's rapporteur, Senator Beata Małecka-Libera. As she said, the document is an "incoherent conglomeration" of various unrelated provisions, and represents another step in the centralization of health care. As she stressed, a "devastating" opinion on the bill was presented by the Senate Legislative Bureau, according to which it raises fundamental systemic and constitutional objections, and it is not possible to remove them at this stage of the law's procedure. As the senator said, a critical assessment about the bill was also presented by the medical, medical and patient communities. This position was shared by the majority of senators.

- We have a very good standard of treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), but it treats at most 30% of the population suffering from the exudative form. The rest of the patients simply go blind," says Malgorzata Pacholec, president of the Retina AMD Association of Poland, commenting on the findings of the latest report on the disease. As she adds, what is needed above all is early diagnosis. However, it turns out that one has to wait up to six months for a consultation.

Three prizes worth a total of PLN 200,000 went to the winners of the third edition of the Huawei Startup Challenge. They are the creators of innovative solutions that have the potential to revolutionize health care. The winning projects involve monitoring sleep apnea, diagnosing damage to the pelvic floor muscles that can occur during childbirth, and a solution that could significantly reduce the time it takes to develop new drugs.

The main prize, a check worth PLN 100 thousand, went to the creators of the Clebre sleep-disordered breathing diagnostic system. The second place and a check worth PLN 60 thousand went to the startup OASIS Diagnostics, which is the creator of the ONIRY medical device, designed to diagnose perinatal injuries. A prize worth PLN 40 thousand was received by PioLigOn, which developed a computer algorithm for the rapid design of unnatural peptides. This addresses the need to develop efficient computational (in silico) methods for peptide drug discovery.