A group of researchers led by Liesbeth de Vries of the UMCG (UMC Groningen), Guus van Dongen (Amsterdam UMC), John Haanen (NKI/AVL), and Peter de With (TU/e) has joined forces in the FORESIGHT consortium. This consortium will receive a grant of no less than €9 million from Health~ Holland to conduct research in the field of drug development supported by molecular imaging.
The new FORESIGHT consortium will stimulate research that will improve the use and development of immunotherapy. These relatively new drugs are now hugely successful in tackling severe conditions. These include oncological, autoimmune, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases.
However, this group of drugs is not only successful but also expensive. And not every drug is equally effective for everyone.
The three big questions that the FORESIGHT consortium would like to investigate are: when to use immunotherapy, which drug is most suitable, and which patients benefit from it. These questions are relevant for both existing therapies and for the development of new successful medicines.
Various examinations needed
To address these questions, several studies are needed. The FORESIGHT consortium will receive 3 million euros per year from Health~Holland for the next three years. In addition, this is a public-private partnership, which means that every public euro is matched by a euro from the business community.
So, the consortium can distribute 18 million euros in total over various studies in 2025-2027. The first call for research proposals is expected soon.
The FORESIGHT consortium has created a special program to stimulate the use of molecular imaging in developing new drugs. The aim of the program is to provide advanced nuclear and optical imaging techniques, high-quality expertise (including AI) and infrastructure to monitor the behavior of drugs in the body and to develop imaging biomarkers.
This makes it possible to map tissue properties down to the cellular level and to determine and quantify the distribution of drugs in the body.
Few data points, yet reliable advice
That is why the group of TU/e researcher Fons van der Sommen , Video Coding & Architectures, is also closely involved in establishing the consortium. This group was led by Peter de With until his retirement. He will remain at TU/e for a number of projects and his new role as one of the program leaders in FORESIGHT.
As program leader, Peter de With will assess and evaluate the research proposals with other principal investigators from the institutions involved.
It is really a challenge to match the right patient with the right immunotherapy treatment.
- Fons van der Sommen
Van der Sommen: "It is really a challenge to match the right patient with the right treatment. And to know when is the best time to give that treatment. Our knowledge and experience in working with image processing and AI on effective diagnostics will help us with this."
"Thanks to these very advanced imaging techniques that will be investigated within FORESIGHT, we have insights we can use to train AI models," explains Van der Sommen. "We can, so to speak, predict what the drugs will do in which patient."
"The big challenge for us will be to achieve effective results with our models with relatively few data points. Immunotherapy is still very expensive, so the group of patients who receive it is not extremely large. We will work with that relatively small dataset."
New drug development
In recent years, people have already been developing new, targeted medicines. However, the development of new medicines takes a long time and is very expensive, and there is a great risk that this development will have to be stopped prematurely so that the medicines never come to market.
Furthermore, if these drugs do come on the market, they often do not work for everyone, so the expected breakthroughs do not materialize. The consortium hopes to change this with its research. The FORESIGHT Service and Innovation Center will support drug studies from UMCs and NKI/AVL as well as from national and international pharma/biotech, SMEs, and start-up companies.
"It is really great to see such leading researchers from oncology in this consortium working with us," adds Van der Sommen. "In addition to our research group for imaging and AI, Willem Mulder and Roy van der Meel and their Precision Medicine group are also working in this consortium. I am also very much looking forward to working with them."
About FORESIGHT
UMC Groningen, Amsterdam UMC, NKI/AVL, and the Eindhoven University of Technology work together in the FORESIGHT-PPP program. They have bundled their high-quality expertise and infrastructure in the FORESIGHT Service and Innovation Center. Multidisciplinary teams with unique knowledge of tracer development, bioengineering, imaging and data analysis/AI work here. These support the medical teams that carry out (pre)clinical molecular imaging studies in the field of oncological, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.
About Health~Holland
Top Sector Life Sciences & Health (Health~Holland) is the driving force behind innovation within the Life Sciences & Health (LSH) sector. Health Holland's goal is to achieve both economic and social impact. Therefore, it invests in a wide range of top disciplines in order to stimulate groundbreaking scientific discoveries and technological innovations.
