New Erasmus MC Campus gives space for future health and tech

In early 2020, new plans were announced for building a new Campus at the heart of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Based on the grounds of Erasmus MC, the Campus will provide a location for the recently established convergence programme of the Erasmus University Medical Center, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft ) where these three highly respected institutions collaborate on innovation and education across the many themes related to future health.

Today we have the privilege to talk to Hans van Leeuwen, vice-chair of the board of directors and Dean at Erasmus MC about the plans for the Campus, what makes Rotterdam the ideal place for innovation in health technology and how this will benefit society, science and companies alike.

Artist impression of the Erasmus MC campus © Erasmus MC

Setting the right conditions

Hans van Leeuwen: “The organization that will develop the Campus is being formed at this time. But there is already a lot going on and research programmes and expert groups are already up and running. We are committed to creating an environment that is fit for addressing the great health care and societal challenges.”

An important aspect of future healthcare will be to develop a shared understanding of the required conditions to facilitate innovation and transition in health care and enable moving from cure to prevention. Technological and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations are at the centre of this. An example project is Consultation Room 2030. The team realizes that as we currently think of a consultation room as four walls, a doctor and a patient, a totally different setting will be needed in the future to facilitate the new reality.

Easy access to secure patient data will be prevalent and the role of doctors will evolve as technology takes over many of their analytical tasks and operations. We, both patients and health care providers, need to accept and trust technology and AI. At the same time at a macro level, the health care budget is important as well as the socioeconomic differences and access to health care and chances of staying healthy. This all is an integral part of a typical convergence project like Consultation Room 2030 where technology, (bio)medical, economic and social sciences come together.

TU Delft – consultation room 2030 – photo: Guus Schoonewille

Hans van Leeuwen: “We have started the process to develop the Campus, where the future of healthcare can be created. A place that facilitates future developments, with enough free space to respond and adapt to new insights. It will also support the process of the convergence, by identifying the right stakeholders and environment.”

Rotterdam, a destined region for future health to take shape

To substantiate Rotterdam’s focus on future health, let’s consider the region’s heritage, its current context and the fundaments of future healthcare. For example, we can look at the knowledge mix at Erasmus MC, Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and TU Delft, 3 top institutes within a 15km radius. Erasmus MC is the largest and highest-ranked academic medical center in the Netherlands. TU Delft is world-renowned in mechanical engineering, mathematics and computer science & information systems, while EUR has an outstanding reputation in health economics, business & management and social sciences. This mix of knowledge has created the perfect outset which is exactly what we need in future health.

Earsmus universiteit-tudelft-erasmusmc-convergence-foto-Chris-Gorzeman

Photo: Chris Gorzeman

Hans van Leeuwen: “To give you an example, engineers have been involved in our Thorax Centre at Erasmus MC since the 1960’s working on and innovating, among others, imaging and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. This shows that technology is since long at the heart of Erasmus MC, and where our medical centre is still at the forefront of developments. Examples of recent spin-off companies are Kaminari Medical and Quantib offering technological and AI-based health care innovations”

Solid digital infrastructure

Digital solutions will be determinative in future healthcare and solid digital infrastructure is a prerequisite for enabling that future. The Netherlands has among the best digital infrastructures in the world and continues to invest and upgrade. But the real challenge lies in creating a solid data-based health research infrastructure for optimal access to knowledge, tools, facilities, health data and samples. Van Leeuwen: “A multidisciplinary approach is required to enable this in a secure, ethical, legally valid, patient-centred and user-friendly manner. Erasmus MC is a trusted high-quality health care partner, but we also need to be the trusted partner when it comes to the patient’s data.”

©Quantib

To this end, in Erasmus MC we started a couple of years ago the program Research Suite which aims to bring together all that is needed to work safely with health care and research data. It enables optimal use of health data, samples and images, a learning healthcare system and accelerate personalized health. The principle that is being implemented is to not transport data but provide access to specific datasets to requestors at the location where the data is stored. It will provide the infrastructure that enables building regional and national data networks for health care. There are still many challenges to solve, but we are making steady progress.” Hans van Leeuwen continues.

The Research Suite program is linked to Health-RI, a collaborative programme initiated by the Dutch Federation of University Medical Centers, that has recently secured a 69 million subsidy of the ‘Nationaal Groeifonds’ programme.

A local living lab to solve global health challenges

Future health is about much more than medicine, it is about being healthy throughout life. “We are shifting from a cure-based approach to a prevention-based approach: promoting a healthy lifestyle as opposed to providing treatments after the damage is already done.” Welfare plays a crucial role in lifestyle, and Rotterdam is a classroom example of a multicultural city with broad social and economic diversity. This makes our region an ideal testing ground for studying health care differences and for new approaches to promoting a healthy lifestyle and facilitating lifestyle changes. It really is a ‘Living Lab and a proxy of global challenges”, which means that solutions will have a global impact.

“The fact that Rotterdam is such a multicultural and diverse city also means that there is a lot of data out there that is useful from the perspective of global diversity. Population studies like Generation R and the Rotterdam study track groups of habitants and their health over a long period of time – in case of Generation R, aspiring mothers and fathers are followed from the moment of intended conception, birth and through to adulthood. This provides a wealth of data.”

Creating solutions with global impact

“The new Campus brings together current expertise in the delivery of healthcare in order to achieve new solutions for the future. Hereto, we would be happy to welcome other healthcare institutions to our campus like the Eye Hospital, Rijndam Rehabilitation Centre and Laurens. We expect that collaboration between care providers, academic researchers and patients will lead to new innovations, which can be tested and optimized in the real-life setting at the healthcare institution.”

For the investments in the Campus and the resulting innovations to benefit our national and global society, expertise in entrepreneurship and business management is added to the mix. Experts from EUR and TU Delft are engaged to help successfully bring these solutions to market and establish a scalable business model.

The campus ecosystem should also comprise of companies large and small.The way research institutions deal with IP today can sometimes be obstructive and prevents inventions from reaching the market. By re-thinking IP-ownership, some of the obstacles in entrepreneurship and collaboration between companies and our academic institutions may be taken away. The Campus is an ideal environment for collaboration with companies in order to accelerate getting inventions to society.

Join this exciting community and co-create the future of health

The excellent preconditions in the greater Rotterdam – Delft – The Hague region have played an important role in the emergence of the many current developments, such as the convergence between the three research institutions, in shaping the future of healthcare. It already attracts companies to the region, who find a home in one of the entrepreneurial hotspots in Rotterdam, such as Cambridge Innovation Centre. The new Campus will help accelerate the initiatives and bring together a highly diverse community of academic experts, healthcare professionals and companies. Leading facilities, data infrastructure and the right conditions will be in place to ignite new ideas, create a test environment in the surrounding living labs of Rotterdam and deliver to the global market. Sharing a healthy future with the world.