With the increase in antibiotics resistance, bacterial infections pose an ever-growing threat to the health of humans and animals. Every year, thousands of people die worldwide due to antibiotics resistance, and that number will only grow if no new solutions for the treatment and prevention of bacterial infections are developed.

NADP facilitates partnerships between companies and research groups working on the development of new antibiotics, both in the form of new molecules and pre-clinical development, as well as alternatives to antibiotics, such as vaccines. The NADP partners are the Netherlands Centre for One Health (NCOH) in Utrecht, the Centre for Antimicrobial Research (CARES) in Leiden, the Center for Sustainable Antimicrobials (CeSAM) in Groningen, and Immuno Valley in Utrecht. The independent Chairman of NADP is Kees de Joncheere, former Director Department of Essential Medicines and Health Products at the World Health Organization.

Since 2016, research groups in the Netherlands collaborate in the field of antimicrobial resistance, new antibiotics, and alternatives as part of the NCOH Strategic Research Theme ‘Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance’. NADP strives to bring these groups together with the business community to accelerate the development of these new antibiotics and alternatives.

A research programme by the NWO TTW will support the acceleration of the development of new antibiotics and alternatives. The Ministry of Public Health, Welfare and Sport, the NWO, and the Topsector Chemistry have made approximately 6 million Euros available for this programme. The NWO TTW programme is expected to open this call for public-private project proposals in late April 2017.

On 18 April 2017, NADP will officially be launched at a kick-off event with a matchmaking session in Utrecht. The goal of the matchmaking session is to bring potential partners together for new project applications, including those for the NWO TTW call, which will be presented in a plenary session as part of the programme. For more information about NADP and the launch event, please visit nadp.nl.

NADP was founded by the partners with the support of the Ministry of Public Health, Welfare, and Sport and the Topsector Life Sciences & Health, after consultations with companies and knowledge institutions working in the field of antimicrobial resistance. The results of these consultations, conducted by InnoTact Consulting and concluded with a final report to the Ministry, were used to bring together the NADP partners and to draw up plans of action for NADP.

Over 300 visitors

On 7 March, ZonMw organised the second public-private partnership (PPP) day in Utrecht in collaboration with Health~Holland. This year’s event was entitled ‘Innovation through co-creation’ and brought together over 300 people from research organisations, companies, health foundations and government. The day brought a highly various programme containing sessions about best practices, Health Technology Assessments, patient participation, PPP Allowance and much more.

The event further included information about all current calls on PPPs by ZonMw and Health Foundation. Henk Smit (Director of ZonMw) and Marlouke Durville (Director Core Processes and Legal Affairs of the Netherlands Enterprise Agency) signed a covenant between the two organisations to underline their further collaboration and to achieve more SME involvement. Eline Slagboom (DuSRa) creatively performed a song about elderly care during the break.

Health~Holland morning session on national PPP initiatives

The morning started with an inspiration and information session for all large national PPP initiatives organised by the Top Sector Life Sciences & Health. During this get-together Marianne van der Steen (RegMed XB), Peter Sterk (National Lung Programme) and Angus Livingstone (Oncode Institute) gave inspiring talks about how to set up such a large, nationally supported initiative and which stakeholders should be taken into account. They all shared their lessons learned during this process and gave open advice to all particpants. Although every initiative is different in set up, goals and organisation, sharing knowledge about the realisation of large consortia can be very valuable for the innovative position of the Netherlands.

IMDI Talent Prize

The day was festively drawn to a close with the award of the IMDI talent prize to a talented student. The jury handed this year’s prize to Ida Poortinga, for her development of a software application that enables hand therapeutics and patients to design a finger splint. The digital design can be sent to a company to be 3D printed.

Watch the video below to hear more on the value of public private partnerships.

The ten organisations - VSNU, KNAW, NWO, VH, KB, SURF, NFU, ZonMw, PNN and GO FAIR – are giving a clear signal: open science will become a reality in the Netherlands. The  ambition is to realise 100% open access of scientific publications in 2020. To achieve this, universities will have to further negotiate with scientific publishers, with whom they have already had several successes during the last two years.  Furthermore, open science contributes to an optimal (re)use of research data in all research areas. These data will be provided under well-defined conditions and following the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles . Finally, the National Platform Open Science will investigate how open science can be combined with the recognition of and rewards for researchers, research groups and proposals.

Read the National Open Science Plan here or visit the website to follow the latest developments.

Azurion is the result of a multi-year development program conducted in collaboration with leading clinicians in the field to acknowledge that with the rapid growth of image-guided therapy procedures, hospitals and health systems are increasingly faced with the need to control costs while improving their standards of care. Azurion has been designed to address these challenges and is equipped with new workflow options and performance dashboards, as well as an upcoming range of productivity improvement services.

The Azurion platform features over 1,000 new components, including an enhanced flat-panel detector and Philips’ newly developed ConnectOS operating system for the seamless integration of real-time information from all relevant technologies in the interventional lab. All of these components work together to deliver high image quality at ultra-low radiation exposure and real-time image processing on multiple work spots within the interventional lab. Parallel working enables the team of clinicians to complete different tasks simultaneously, saving valuable time without compromising quality of care.

Source: Philips