A group of researchers led by Liesbeth de Vries of UMCG, Guus van Dongen (AUMC), John Haanen (NKI/AVL) and Peter de With (TU Eindhoven) have joined forces in the FORESIGHT consortium. This consortium receives a grant of no less than €9 million from Health~Holland to do research in the field of drug development supported by molecular imaging. This involves research into oncological, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases.
The number of people suffering from oncological, autoimmune, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases is expected to increase significantly in the coming years. In addition to burdening more patients, this threatens a care infarct and makes care unaffordable.
New targeted drugs are therefore being developed for these diseases in recent years. But developing new drugs takes a long time, is very expensive and there is a high risk that this development will have to be stopped prematurely, resulting in the drugs never reaching the market. Furthermore, when these drugs do reach the market, they often do not work for everyone, resulting in a lack of expected breakthroughs.
The FORESIGHT consortium has created a special program to encourage the use of molecular imaging in developing new drugs. The aim of the program is to provide advanced nuclear and optical imaging techniques, high-level expertise (including AI) and infrastructure to track drug behavior in the body and develop imaging biomarkers. With these, tissue properties can be mapped down to the cellular level and the distribution of drugs in the body can be determined and quantified. The resulting knowledge accelerates preclinical and clinical drug development, increases the success rate and thus reduces development costs, and improves efficacy through better drug choice for individual patients.
The FORESIGHT Service and Innovation Centre will support drug trials by UMCs and NKI/AVL as well as national and international pharma/biotech, SME and start-up companies.
About FORESIGHT:
In the FORESIGHT PPP programme, UMCG, AUMC, NKI/AVL and TU Eindhoven collaborate with each other. They have combined their high-quality expertise and infrastructure in the FORESIGHT Service and Innovation Centre. Multidisciplinary teams with unique knowledge of tracer development, bioengineering, imaging and data analysis/AI work here. These support medical teams conducting (pre)clinical molecular imaging studies in the fields of oncological-, autoimmune-, cardiovascular- and neurodegenerative diseases.
About Health~Holland
Top Sector Life Sciences & Health (Health~Holland) is driving innovation within the Life Sciences & Health (LSH) sector. Health~Holland's goal is to realise both economic and societal impact. It therefore invests in a wide range of top disciplines to stimulate ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovations.