Dean HO
Director, The N.1 Institute for Health
Director, The Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM)
Provost's Chair Professor & Head, NUS Biomedical Engineering | biedh@.nus.edu.sg

Professor Dean Ho focuses on improving patient outcomes using innovative digital medicine and optimisation technologies. It is known that when effective drugs are given at suboptimal dosages, efficacy can be impaired, or even absent. This is a major cause of clinical trial failure and is responsible for poor response rates from patients.

To address this issue, Prof Ho develops personalised interventions. He has successfully led several first in-human trials aimed at improving the clinical efficacy and safety of combination therapies for individual patients using artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to determine the best possible drug treatment regimens and doses for cancer patients and organ transplant recipients.

Technology alone will not empower next-generation healthcare. Bridging disciplines spanning across digital medicine, clinical care and behavioural sciences will revolutionise future clinical practices.

One platform, known as CURATE.AI, works by assessing a patient’s response to a drug, or combination of drugs, as they are undergoing treatment. CURATE.AI suggests optimal dosage levels depending on how the patient is responding.

CURATE AI image
Personalised treatments are necessary as patients vary from each other and also from themselves over time. CURATE.AI addresses this challenge by dynamically adjusting therapy dosing to optimise treatment in a sustained manner.

Drug doses may be reduced, yet drug efficacy can increase. The risk of drug side effects is also reduced. The patient’s own data is all that is used to optimise their own regimen for the entire duration of care. This information can then be used to dynamically refine dosages that are given to broader populations, or sub-populations of patients. Such an approach is a significant shift from traditional methods, where drug dosages are predetermined based on known toxicity levels and efficacy in whole populations.

CURATE.AI has optimised human treatments for broad indications ranging from oncology to infectious diseases, and the trials have halted disease progression and resulted in durable patient responses that far outperformed standard of care approaches. It was for this work that Prof Ho was elected as a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors in 2018, the highest honour for academic inventors.