OA affects more than 500 million people worldwide, causing pain, disability, and major healthcare costs, up to 2.5% of GDP. As populations age, OA prevalence is expected to nearly double in the next decade. Developing new effective treatments is a key goal, however progress is stalled due to the complexity of the disease, its slow progression, a lack of tools for optimising patient selection, weak links between disease phase and symptoms, and regulatory challenges.
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To move forward, PROBE was initiated to achieve better clinical trial designs using modern data tools and new ways to measure disease progression. Improved prediction models developed in PROBE may help identify patients most likely to worsen, allowing more targeted treatments and more effective clinical trials. These models may also support better decision-making in everyday clinical care. In addition, genetic and molecular research will help uncover the biological pathways behind OA, opening the door to new treatment approaches.

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A Patient-focused Approach

The PROBE project has been uniquely designed to bring together critical expertise and resources to offer a 360-degree perspective necessary for transforming OA research and accelerating treatment development to benefit patients. Key to PROBEs mission is ensuring that patients’ voices are heard and used to inform project goals, alongside input from key expertise across regulatory, ethical, data security, HTA, and health care provision. The consortium is led by Erasmus University Medical Center (The Netherlands) as the Coordinator, Novartis (Switzerland) as the Project Lead and Sanofi (France) as the co-lead. Driven by thirty-eight (38) partner organisations from fifteen (15) countries, PROBE will continue for 5 years through a €26 million budget coming from IHI (€14 million) and industry (€12 million).
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SYNAPSE leads the dissemination and communication of the PROBE project’s achievements, developing communication tools, coordinating outreach activities, and ensuring the project’s visibility across key audiences. In addition, our company contributes to project management by supporting the leadership team in project monitoring and in the implementation of management procedures.

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"We are honoured to join this major initiative, and through our commitment to communication and dissemination, we aim to amplify the impact of PROBE not only by showcasing its scientific excellence, but also by ensuring that results reach patients and contribute to a meaningful shift in care and treatment." - Sandra Pla (COO)

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Main Objectives

The principal goal of PROBE is to improve OA treatment and thereby the lives of more than 500 million OA patients. To achieve this, PROBE will use data-driven tools to improve how we predict OA progression, guide clinical decisions, and design better treatments. A secure, regulation-compliant federated network will be created that links together diverse types of OA data, allowing researchers to apply powerful novel big-data methods. Collaborating closely with patients, caregivers, regulators, and healthcare experts, new methods for measuring disease changes and new strategies for clinical trials will also be developed. Insights into patient subgroups and predictors of progression will help make trials more efficient, support the development of targeted therapies, and improve shared decision-making between patients and caregivers.

Future vision

PROBE is an innovative project with the potential to transform OA understanding, diagnosis, and treatment through the development of patient-relevant endpoints, advanced predictive models, and next-generation clinical trial designs using federated big data and AI technologies. Altogether, patients’ lives will be improved through the enhancement of intervention timeliness and effectiveness, while more targeted and efficient clinical trial design reduces costs and length.
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For more information, check PROBE website and follow the project on LinkedIn.

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