Last year Kaiku Health announced its collaboration with Novartis in developing digital patient monitoring and management for melanoma patients.

Following the success of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis are now expanding it into a partnership, they state.

“The cooperation so far has shown that together we can enhance the monitoring and symptom management of melanoma patients specifically. We are committed and excited to continue this work together, as well as to scale our joint efforts across new cancer types and treatments globally,” says Henri Virtanen, Deputy General Manager and Co-Founder of Kaiku Health.

The first phase of the collaboration

In the first phase of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving Tafinlar (dabrafenib) and Mekinist (trametinib) combination targeted therapies for adjuvant, unresectable or metastatic melanoma with BRAF mutation.

The goal was to generate novel insights on patient outcomes in a real-world setting and to develop more advanced machine learning based algorithms, such as symptom prediction, for personalizing the symptom management of patients receiving Tafinlar and Mekinist, and other BRAF and MEK combination therapies. The project started with cancer clinics in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy using the Tafinlar and Mekinist specific module alongside Kaiku’s BRAF/MEK Module.

The next phase of the partnership

“The next phase of our partnership includes taking machine learning algorithms further. Machine learning based symptom prediction is one great way to bring precision medicine to more and more patients and we are excited to keep working on it together, enhancing the now existing ML-model in melanoma, but also starting to work on ML-models in other indications and treatments,” says Virtanen.

The cooperation has already expanded with additional cancer clinics starting to use the melanoma Tafinlar and Mekinist-specific module.

Kaiku Health acquired by Elekta in 2020

Kaiku Health is a digital health intervention platform classified as a Medical Device in cancer care. Its algorithms screen symptoms, notify care teams and provide personalized support for patients. Kaiku Health has modules for over 25 cancer types across different cancer care pathways.

Since 2020 Kaiku Health has been a part of Elekta. Read more about the acquisition and Kaiku’s journey in our upcoming issue of Nordic Life Science magazine – Out September 12th!

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Photo of Kaiku Health dashboard