Kaiku Health, Novartis Expand Partnership in Melanoma Cancer Care

Kaiku Health, an Elekta company, and Novartis will expand their partnership, initially announced in 2021, in developing digital patient monitoring and management for melanoma patients.

“Our goal is to make precision medicine available for the growing number of cancer patients,” says Henri Virtanen, Deputy General Manager and Cofounder of Kaiku Health. “The cooperation has shown that together we can enhance the monitoring and symptom management of melanoma (skin cancer) patients. We are committed and excited to continue this work, as well as to broaden our joint efforts across other cancer types and treatments globally.”

In the first phase of the collaboration, Kaiku Health and Novartis developed a therapy-specific module for patients receiving anti-cancer medicines* produced by Novartis for forms of melanoma. 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 the Novartis medicines, and other combination therapies.

The project started at cancer clinics in Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy using the specific module for Novartis medicines alongside an established module from Kaiku.

“The next phase of our partnership includes taking machine learning algorithms further. Machine-learning-based symptom prediction is a great way to bring precision medicine to more patients. We are excited to enhance the existing machine-learning model in melanoma and applying it to new models for other indications and treatments,” Virtanen continues.

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