OncoWatch

Innovation

cancerdiagnostics

Using data to improve prostate cancer diagnostics and treatment

OncoWatch provides improved prostate cancer diagnostics and new analytical tools for precision medicine, leading to improved care, reduced time to treatment, cost savings and accelerated drug implementation.

Origins

Today’s prostate cancer diagnostics are suboptimal. Over- and under-diagnosis lead to high mortality, unnecessary treatments and long waiting times before treatment. Pathology is a major bottle neck, with a high variability in quality, a shortage of uropathologists and insufficient use of available data. Many new drugs are entering the market but are not efficiently used, due to lack of predictive markers.

Team

The project is led by Karolinska Institutet in close collaboration with Philips, Synlab, Thermo Fisher, the European Prostate Cancer Coalition, a patient organisation, and OncoAlgorithm, a KI spinout. The project team at KI is the same one that successfully led the commercialisation of the blood-based Stockholm3 test for prostate cancer. OncoWatch Image will be demonstrated in five hospitals in four different countries.

EIT Oncowatch

The project

OncoWatch provides game changing improvements to prostate cancer diagnostics and treatment by combining Big Data, AI and cloud-based technologies to achieve several advances:

  • OncoWatch Image provides faster, better and cheaper image analysis of prostate biopsies.
  • OncoWatch Explore brings new analytical tools for precision medicine, leading to reduced time to treatment and accelerated drug implementation.
  • OncoWatch Control is a cloudbased, IEC62304- and GDPR-compliant, infrastructure tailored to provide customers access to OncoWatch Image and OncoWatch Explore.

EIT Health makes it possible to implement and assess prototypes and fine-tune the product offerings. EIT Health specifically adds three values to the project, acting as:

  • A catalyst for public/HCP/industry/academia cooperation for testing, validation and market access.
  • A vehicle to accelerate the uptake and acceptance of the concept.
  • A provider of additional financing, to facilitate the partnership between the participants in the project.`
Impact

OncoWatch provides substantial value to prostate cancer patients and society by improving the quality of care, reducing time-to-treatment and side-effects, lowering healthcare costs and accelerating the implementation of new and more effective drugs.

Why this is an EIT Health project

OncoWatch is in keeping with the EIT Health Focus Area of “Care Pathways” because it speeds and improves screening for prostate cancer and can improve treatment with personalised medicine approaches. Many of the team members behind the project were involved with STHLM3RS, which supported development of Stockholm 3 and was one of EIT Health’s most successful Innovaiton Projects.

External Partners
  • Capio Saint Göran’s Hospital
  • Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton Somerset Trust
  • OncoAlgorithm
  • UOMO
Martin Steinberg
| Project Leader | Karolinska Institutet
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