THE IHI-PROBE EUROPEAN CONSORTIUM KICK OFF MEETING & CHONDROMETRICS’ CONTRIBUTION TO THE 6 WORKPACKAGES

After announcing the company’s participation in the IHI-PROBE (Patient Relevant Osteoarthritis endpoints using Big data Evaluation) project, launched on December 1st, 2025, it’s a great pleasure to now meet the participants

This pioneering initiative under the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU) represents a large-scale public-private partnership to revolutionise the way osteoarthritis (OA) is understood, diagnosed, and treated by developing patient-relevant endpoints, advanced predictive models, and next-generation clinical trial designs, using federated big data and AI technologies.

Running over 5 years, PROBE unites 38 partners from academia, industry, patient organisations, regulatory bodies, and healthcare professionals. It is jointly led by Erasmus MC Medical University Center and Novartis, embodying a strong commitment to transform evidence-based osteoarthritis research and improving patient care on a global scale.

PROBE will tackle key limitations in OA clinical research, by creating a secure federated learning infrastructure, where sensitive health data remain local while enabling large-scale AI-driven analyses.
It aims to leverage data from over 70 million individuals across multiple OA cohorts and real-world registries; its vision aligns with ethical, legal, and regulatory standards.

The top aims of PROBE are:
 – Development of novel multimodal endpoints to support better treatment evaluation.
 – Creation of a regulation-compliant federated OA database network.
 – Use of foundation AI models to predict disease progression and support personalised medicine.
 – Tools for shared decision-making between patients and healthcare providers.
 – Strong engagement with patients, caregivers, regulators, HTA bodies, and clinicians.

The project is supported by the IHI JU under Grant Agreement No. 101219324. The JU receives support from the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, COCIR, EFPIA, EuropaBio, MedTech Europe, Vaccines Europe, Pacira Pharmaceuticals Inc., Capgemini Consulting, and Nordic Bioscience.

PROBE aims to improve the lives of over 500 million patients suffering from OA globally by enabling earlier and more effective interventions, while reducing the cost and duration of clinical trials through more targeted and efficient design strategies.

Finally, on Jan 12/13, 2026, members of the IHI PROBE consortium met in Rotterdam for its kick-off. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting place, with Erasmus University Medical Centre and Sita Bierma-Zeinstra being the academic lead. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) was a humanist scholar who championed critical thinking and the exchange of ideas across borders — values that resonate strongly with the spirit of PROBE. The project fosters strong collaboration between academia and industry, with Novartis and Matthias Schieker taking the industry lead

The IHI (Innovative Health Initiative – https://www.ihi.europa.eu/ ) is a European private public partnership between the EU and Europe’s life science industries (budget 2.4 billion € in 2021-27). It is designed to accelerate health innovation by bringing together academia, industry, SMEs, clinicians, and patients around shared research challenges.

The PROBE Consortium was the winner of a 2-step application (IHI call 8, topic 2) and entails six work packages (WPs), suggesting to transform osteoarthritis research and care using big data, AI, and federated analysis of large patient cohorts. It aims to develop more efficient (surrogate) endpoints, predictive models, trial designs, patient-focused outcomes, and personalized medicine.

Chondrometrics (specifically Wolfgang Wirth, Jonathan Larkin, and Felix Eckstein) will contribute their long-standing expertise and data-base of MRI-based quantitative articular tissue imaging endpoints to this seminal project. Precise and sensitive imaging biomarkers are used to move beyond static snapshots toward longitudinal surrogate endpoints and true disease-modifying insights

The kick-off meeting aligned work packages, scientific and operational interfaces, and is meant to turn an ambitious proposal into a coordinated, actionable research agenda. Equally important: the partners meet in person, exchange perspectives, and build the trust that large, interdisciplinary consortia depend on.

Chondrometrics is set to contribute most of the six WPs. These constitute a pipeline reaching from innovation to real-world clinical impact, set to laying a foundation for more efficient clinical trials, better treatments, and personalised care for people living with OA:

Lead – Guide – Create – Analyse – Implement – Sustain

🔹WP1: Enables efficient collaboration by professional project management (Lead: Sita Bierma-Zeinstra – Matthias Schieker)

🔹WP2: Embeds key stakeholders and ensures that ethical & regulatory guidelines are taken into account (Franziska Saxer – Laura Witkam – David Hunter)

🔹WP3: Generates a robust federated learning (FL) data base, FL infrastructure and the foundation models. It permits sensitive patient data to remain behind local firewalls, without the need to conduct data transfers to a central hub (Leads: Jan Baumbach – Thorsten Alexander Rall – Gunther Jansen)

🔹WP4: Identifies biomarkers prognostic of disease progression, OA patient clusters (endotypes, subgroups), and effective treatment evaluation by surrogate endpoints. Reviews biomarkers across domains, in context of advanced statistics and novel AI technology provided by WP3 (Leads: Eleftheria Zeggini – Anne C. Bay-Jensen – Laura Witkam)

🔹WP5: Implements knowledge gained above into novel OA trial designs and patient care. Informs health care decision makers and economists (Leads: Philip Conaghan – John D. Jackson – Alfred Gellhorn)

🔹WP6: Disseminates PROBE results to external stakeholders, implements a sustainable vision for applying the FL infrastructure, and ensure ethical, legal, regulatory and societal integration (Leads Chris James – Matthias Schieker)

Chondrometrics will contribute to WPs 2-6:

🔹Wolfgang Wirth, CEO, is involved in WPs 2-4, where he supports alignment with regulatory guidelines (WP2). Together with Susanne Maschek, COO, he will help building the WP3 FL-data base, contributing large numbers and types of technically and clinically validated imaging endpoints, which have been generated by Chondrometrics in previous projects (e.g. knee cartilage & meniscus morphometry, cartilage relaxometry, Hoffa & thigh adipose tissue/muscle morphometry)

🔹 Jonathan Larkin, scientific consultant, participates in WPs 2-5. He co-leads WP5 with the attempt to integrate knowledge of WP4 to explore novel designs of clinical DMOAD trials and new approaches of shared decision-making between patients and-physicians.

🔹 Felix Eckstein, CMO, is involved in WPs 3-6. He will help with interpreting imaging endpoints (Lead Edwin Oei), clinical outcomes, and multi modal biomarkers spanning across domains (WP4), and support dissemination (WP6).