Rapid and continuing advances in biomarker testing are not being matched by take-up in health systems, and this is hampering both patient care and innovation. It also risks costing health systems the opportunity to make their services more efficient and, over time, more economical. The potential that public health genomics has brought to biomarker testing in diagnosis, prediction and research is being realised, pre-eminently in many cancers, but also in an ever-wider range of conditions. But development is impeded by data deficiencies, and lack of policy alignment on standards, approval and reimbursement. Europe should already have in place a guarantee of universal access to a minimum suite of biomarker tests and should be planning for an optimum testing scenario with a wider range of biomarker tests integrated into a more sophisticated health system articulated around personalised medicine. Improving healthcare and winning advantages for Europe’s industrial competitiveness and innovation require an appropriate policy framework – starting with an update to outdated recommendations. Impact: 1. This directly supports activities in two Flagships of the European Beating Cancer plan: Flagship 6 on ‘The new “Cancer Diagnostic and Treatment for All” initiative and Flagship 7 on “Genomic for Public Health”, 2. Short-term effects of the session will be to raise awareness in the community on the need of building such cancer lifespan continuum and provide a new conceptual health paradigm for cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment, 3. Medium-term efforts will be made to define how the new paradigm can fit and be integrated into the healthcare systems of the member states. Large capacity building and knowledge transfer initiatives will be needed for this. 4. The target population of this sessuib in principle includes all stakeholders directly or indirectly concerned in creating the cancer lifespan initiative: cancer healthcare professionals and researchers, cancer patients, citizens and cancer healthcare policy makers. Their experience will provide guidelines and recommendations for further fine-tuning and/or research towards an evidence based cancer lifespan continuum.