Expected Impact

Clinical & scientific

ILLUMINATE will develop a new and validated approach to use metabolic-MRI in optimizing personalized treatments. These will enable:

• Prediction of treatment efficacy to select patients that will likely benefit from treatment.  
• Monitoring of treatment efficacy to support early discontinuation of ineffective treatments and associated side effects, improve treatment outcome without increasing associated side effects, and dose adjustments for treatment intensification.
• Better understanding of fundamental molecular mechanisms of health and disease (cellular and energy pathways mapped throughout the human body over the course of treatments and the development of disease), providing novel starting points for prevention and treatment. 

ILLUMINATE will educate and train healthcare professionals. Among others, these efforts include:

• Education and training on theranostic treatment approaches, recommendations, and clinical guidelines on the most appropriate use of theranostic solutions.
• Advanced training for end-users and researchers.

By collecting the subjective experiences of the treating healthcare providers, ILLUMINATE can tailor the developed technologies and training modules to their respective needs. 

Economic & Technological

Health solutions designed with consideration for the patients as well as the costs will facilitate effective adoption of the health technology by the healthcare system. ILLUMINATE will:  

• Bring to market widely available and affordable metabolic-MRI-based solutions that will improve therapeutic effectiveness of novel theranostic interventions.
• Contribute to a safe, high quality and reliable use of radiological and nuclear technology in healthcare.  
  • The production capacity of lutetium-177 in the EU (Petten, NL) will be increased (from 10 patient doses twice per week mid 2025 to 50 patient doses daily), allowing for overall scalability of production.
  • The improved production line will also speed up approval and authorization of other lutetium-177-based therapies.  
• Arrange for central preparation of final medical isotopes (at NRG PALLAS) for clinical studies and regular care, allowing for cost-effectiveness and consistency of product quality.  
• Reduce dependency on non-EU countries for raw materials by assuring that the whole supply chain from radionucleotide to the production of a medical product is completed within Europe.
• Provide a broader applicable research concept for more sustainable use of limitedly available radionucleotides by implementing a new process for recycling Ytterbium.
• Provide technology developers, healthcare professionals and patients with improved information on the sensitivity, quantification, stratification and staging of diseases.
• Provide proof-of-concept that metabolic-MRI-based assessment of lutetium-177-PSMA treatment increases cost-effectiveness by limiting ineffective treatment. Metabolic-MRI adds 2% of costs while with potential cost savings up to 15%.  
   

Societal

Patients will benefit from truly patient-centric health technologies that provide them with increased treatment efficacy, reduction of time-to-treat, fewer side effects, and reduced duration of hospitalisation. Each patient will get the metabolic-MRI to tailor their treatment for the best quality of life.

To be effective at societal level, ILLUMINATE will implement the following steps that allow for a more efficient use of limited and costly healthcare resources:

• Wide scale availability: ILLUMINATE’s platform employs a scaling approach for metabolic-MRI implementation.
• Strengthening radioisotope supply: ILLUMINATE will ensure that more patients have access to the lutetium treatment, while preventing treatment shortages.
• Robustness of theranostics supply chain of lutetium-177: ILLUMINATE will substantially fortify this process. This will help to optimize production strategies that increase availability of lutetium-177-treatment in more economically viable conditions, increasing the resilience and improved strategic autonomy of Europe’s health systems.  
• ILLUMINATE’s project results and training will be widely distributed to the relevant technology developers and healthcare professionals and integrated into relevant educational frameworks. The networks established via the stakeholder communities will ensure that patients are aware of the available novel technologies and the significance to their condition.  

As a result, European healthcare systems benefit from a broader spectrum of theranostic treatments and improved cost-effectiveness and affordability of theranostic solutions due to scale effects and more robust European supply chains.

Importantly, ILLUMINATE strives to ‘treat the right patient with the right treatment’ and prevent unnecessary treatment-associated adverse events that lead to lower patient burden, cost-effective healthcare, and better resource use.