IBDigital

The challenge

Managing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) requires continuous insight into symptoms, disease activity and treatment response across care settings. Current approaches largely rely on traditional, episodic clinical assessments and are therefore reactive in nature. Even more advanced solutions, such as telemonitoring platforms based on patient-reported questionnaires, typically involve lengthy assessments and capture data only at infrequent intervals. Digital biomarkers offer the potential to complement these approaches by enabling continuous, real-world monitoring and supporting more timely and proactive disease management. However, digital biomarker development in IBD is complex, involving multiple stakeholders, data sources and technologies that are often poorly integrated.

The fragmented nature of current approaches means that valuable data remain siloed, limiting the potential for comprehensive disease monitoring. Healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, MedTech innovators, patient organisations, and research institutions often work in parallel rather than in concert, reducing efficiency and slowing progress. Without coordinated efforts and standardised methodologies, the potential of digital biomarkers to transform IBD care remains unrealised. Patients with IBD experience unpredictable disease courses characterised by periods of remission and relapse, and would benefit enormously from earlier flare detection and more personalised treatment strategies, but achieving this requires a collaborative framework that can bridge organisational boundaries and integrate diverse technologies seamlessly.

The project: IBDigital

IBDigital is a large, multipartner initiative in which TNO acts as the coordinating and orchestrating partner, bringing together healthcare providers, MedTech and pharma companies, patient organisations, and research institutions. The project launched at the ECCO Conference in Berlin in 2025, marking the beginning of a collaborative effort to develop and validate digital biomarkers for IBD management. This kickoff at a major European gastroenterology conference signalled the initiative's ambition and scope, attracting interest from leading stakeholders across the IBD ecosystem.

The project focuses on developing and evaluating digital biomarkers to predict flare-ups in healthcare settings. TNO supports digital biomarker development through data science capabilities and standardized evidence approaches ensuring analytical, clinical, and usability validation. A key innovation is TNO's Remote Data Collection Platform, which enables Bring-Your-Own-Device study designs, allowing patients to use their own wearables and smartphones whilst maintaining data quality and standardisation across the consortium. This approach respects patient preferences and reduces burden whilst generating robust, clinically relevant data.

By coordinating multiple partners and technologies, IBDigital establishes a collaborative framework for developing, validating, and implementing digital biomarkers in IBD. The project generates clinically relevant evidence whilst enabling scalable, patient-centred data collection across partners and technologies, setting a new standard for multipartner digital health initiatives. The orchestration role that TNO fulfils ensures alignment of objectives, methodologies, and timelines across all stakeholders, creating efficiencies that would be impossible for individual organisations working alone.

Looking to the future

Following completion of the initial phase, IBDigital aims to expand validation studies across additional healthcare settings and extend the digital biomarker framework to other inflammatory conditions with similar monitoring challenges. TNO drives the development of an implementation roadmap to ensure post-project adoption of the technology. Sustained collaboration between healthcare providers, industry partners, and patient organisations will be essential to translate validated biomarkers into routine clinical practice. The insights gained will inform regulatory pathways and reimbursement strategies, ultimately improving outcomes for IBD patients through earlier intervention and personalised treatment approaches that match therapy intensity to individual disease trajectories.