Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute are joining forces with the AI4Health initiative to make healthcare more personalized, sustainable, and innovative by developing, validating, and implementing trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) solutions across the care system.
Collaborating to Develop, Validate, and Implement AI Innovations for Health
As AI capabilities rapidly advance, coordinated action is necessary to prevent fragmentation and ensure that new innovations are fit-for-purpose, validated, and implemented in practice. The newly launched AI4Health consortium will tackle this challenge across a broad range of health domains, including oncology, cardiovascular disease, mental and neurological disorders, and regenerative medicine.
The consortium, which unites academia, healthcare providers, patients, payers, regulators, and industry, kicked off with an investment of over €112 million from a range of public and private funders. With support from major players such as the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF), The Hanarth Fund, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), this 10-year program will develop, validate, and implement AI tools to accelerate innovation in healthcare, enable more personalized care, and reduce pressure on the Dutch healthcare system. In oncology, this can translate into faster identification of drug targets, improved patient stratification in clinical trials, and more precise treatment selection for individual patients.
A Key Role for Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute
Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute will play pivotal roles within the oncology domain of AI4Health, which spans use of AI for diagnostics, biomarker validation and implementation, treatment planning, and therapy response prediction. This places the united Oncode ecosystem at the forefront of AI-driven oncology innovation.
A key aim of Oncode Accelerator is to work with partners to build an innovative and integrated oncology drug development ecosystem that will ultimately benefit patients, empower scientists, and boost economic activity. Within this ecosystem, Oncode Accelerator’s focus is specifically on the preclinical stage of therapy development – before investigational drugs reach patients.
Friso Smit, COO of Oncode Accelerator explains: “By collaborating within AI4Health, Oncode Accelerator can fast-track validation and real-world adoption of AI tools that are developed within our program, and identify complementary technologies such as companion diagnostics. In turn, our program’s expertise in regulatory science and readiness will help ensure that technologies developed and validated within AI4Health are accepted by regulators and can move efficiently toward clinical application.”
Friso Smit, COO en onderdeel van de Raad van Bestuur van Stichting Oncode Accelerator
Friso Smit, COO en onderdeel van de Raad van Bestuur van Stichting Oncode Accelerator
“ By collaborating within AI4Health, Oncode Accelerator can fast-track validation and real-world adoption of AI tools that are developed within our program, and identify complementary technologies such as companion diagnostics.
Oncode Institute will primarily support the translation and real-world implementation of AI-enabled technologies. With years of experience in translating promising cancer research discoveries towards the market and clinical applications, Oncode Institute is uniquely positioned to support this stage.
Bertholt Leeftink, Managing Director of Oncode Institute and CEO of Oncode Accelerator, sees this as a mutually beneficial partnership: “By participating in AI4Health, Oncode Institute and Oncode Accelerator both support and gain access to a strategic platform that integrates the AI solutions lifecycle from data and infrastructure management, to AI model development and deployment, to AI governance. This will help us to collectively build a future-proof and sustainable healthcare system in the Netherlands.”
One Integrated Ecosystem for Patient Impact
Developing innovative tools alone is not enough for AI tools to have impact for patients. An integrated research and development infrastructure, clear regulatory pathways, scalability for commercial uptake, and commercial and societal trust are also necessary.
AI4Health addresses this challenge by bringing stakeholders together that can build towards commercial adoption and reimbursement, ethical design of AI tools, and equitable use of innovations alongside technology development.
Tessy Korthout, Business Development Manager at Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute, explains: “Proving that AI models work across hospitals and getting them into clinical practice is a challenge in oncology. AI4Health builds the validation infrastructure and regulatory pathways that have been missing, so that innovations from the Oncode ecosystem can move from promising research to tools that oncologists actually use and patients actually benefit from. This is how we close the gap between AI's potential and its real-world impact."
Tessy Korthout, Business Development Manager bij Stichting Oncode Accelerator en Oncode Institute
Tessy Korthout, Business Development Manager bij Stichting Oncode Accelerator en Oncode Institute
“ By collaborating within AI4Health, we can fast-track validation and real-world adoption of AI tools that are developed within our program, and identify complementary technologies such as companion diagnostics.
By creating this ecosystem of complementary expertise across the entire AI pipeline, the AI4Health consortium complements and extends the activities of Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute. AI4Health will strengthen the whole AI innovation chain, including data access, model development, real-world implementation, and scaling. This can benefit the validation and uptake of individual AI tools developed within Oncode Accelerator and Oncode Institute, and help establish the Netherlands as a frontrunner in trustworthy and sustainable AI for health.