A Q&A with Jan De Backer

Founded iin 2005, FLUIDDA provides respiratory solutions for better patient care. As a major player in the field of Quantitative Pulmonary CT, FLUIDDA leads the pack with its proprietary Functional Respiratory Imaging (FRI) technology. This technique combines HRCT scans and Computational Fluid Dynamics technology, which offers vast improvements by making clinical trials shorter, faster, and more cost effective. FRI also helps patients and healthcare providers in offering a unique entry point in personalized medicine, by optimizing diagnosis, monitoring disease progression, and the effects of therapy. FLUIDDA’s goal is to improve the lives of people suffering from respiratory diseases by optimizing treatment pathways, reducing healthcare costs, and limiting the go-to-market time of respiratory drugs, pulmonology medical devices, and therapies. This passion for innovation drove FLUIDDA to become a founding member of OSIC. From the start, FLUIDDA has shared its expertise and learnings with us and has been a key influence in shaping our mission and driving our strategic direction. We spoke with FLUIDDA CEO Jan De Backer, who also serves on our board of directors, about what first brought him to OSIC, the unique perspective that FLUIDDA brings to our organization, and where he sees OSIC five years down the line. Following is an excerpt from our conversation.
What if we could help democratize medicine by offering a healthcare clinic in rural Kentucky access to the same technology and information as the leading hospital in New York City? What if healthcare providers worldwide could more easily collaborate, pooling their research to help find a cure for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and other rare diseases?

The OSIC Data Repository is attempting to do just that.

Technology and healthcare are becoming increasingly interconnected, with cloud adoption, data sharing and analytics poised to help reshape the future of the healthcare industry.

We recently participated in a webcast  with PwC and Microsoft uses the OSIC Data Repository as an example to discuss how digital and cloud technologies are forging in a new path to manage rare diseases.

“The greatest breakthroughs come at the intersection of different verticals. That’s the premise of OSIC,” said our Executive Director Elizabeth Estes in a recent video interview with WIRED. “Bringing together radiology, pulmonology, computation science; bringing together academia, industry, philanthropy — that’s where breakthroughs happen, because you learn from people who have different vantage points.”
As we have often said, bringing together great minds and good people creates compound effects on progress. More than 122 respiratory, radiology, pulmonology, machine learning, hardware, and software experts contributed their invaluable knowledge to help us create the OSIC Data Repository.

In recent years, significant technology innovations have shaped the future of diagnostic imaging. AI as a supplemental lens for medical image analysis is on the rise, and its use has contributed to rapid developments in many disease states regarding imaging-based diagnosis, prognosis, and prediction of response to therapy.

But for AI to “do its job,” there must be enough data. And up until now, a significant obstacle in harnessing this technology to study pulmonary fibrosis has been the lack of large, diverse imaging repositories needed to drive machine learning research. “Machine learning is the rocket, but the fuel is the data. Without that, we’re going nowhere,” said Dr. Simon Walsh, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, and OSIC radiology lead.

The OSIC Data Repository is changing all of that.

This year, World Lung Day is on Saturday, September 25. Established by The Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS), this annual lung health awareness day is an opportunity for the global community to promote better lung health, advocacy, and action. It’s also a chance for organizations from around the globe to discuss how they can better work together to rid the world of all lung disease.

What happens when you bring together teams of global experts to examine the world’s largest and most diverse data base for rare fibrotic lung diseases?

What is possible when the best and brightest radiologists, pulmonologists, machine learners, and imagine experts from industry and academia pool their collective brain power?

What useful metrics can members of this unique collaborative derive when they kick the tires of the first-of-its-kind global data repository for interstitial lung diseases?

What can they discover, together? We can’t to find out!

Collaboration and access to data help drive medical innovation. “The future of medical research depends heavily on our ability to collate significant amounts of data, and make that data available for detailed and open scientific investigation,” said Dr. David Barber, University College London and OSIC computation science lead. “It’s a proud moment that OSIC is at the forefront of this movement.”

OSIC was created to look at lung diseases differently and to drive collaboration between unlikely partners. We found the best and brightest from around the globe, and asked them to pool their brain power. We gathered radiologists, clinicians, computational scientists, and industry competitors to help us progress in ways we hadn’t yet considered. They collaborated for almost three years, and the outcome — the OSIC Data Repository — is extraordinary.