Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek (TNO)

TNO is an independent and mission-driven research organisation. TNO connects people and knowledge to create innovations that boost the competitive strength of industry and the well-being of society in a sustainable way. This is our mission and it is what drives us, more than  3,400 professionals at TNO, in our work every day. We focus our work on nine domains, one of which is Healthy Living.

Together with government authorities, knowledge institutes and industrial partners, we develop technological and social innovations that promote good health and work availability, and which therefore lead to a healthy, vigorous, and productive population – as well as lowering national healthcare costs and increasing economic growth.

In the Biomedical Health area we develop new technologies, translational preclinical models, measurement and in-silico tools to help the developers of medicines and functional foods to develop new products and test their effectiveness and safety more efficiently.

Within Biomedical health we address the need for better predictive, translational models and tools for efficient drug and other intervention development. We focus on development and application of validated, highly predictive translational models (in-vitro, ex-vivo, in-vivo and in-silico) that assess the efficacy, kinetics and toxicity of various interventions (drugs, foods, lifestyle) in humans, applicable in the entire product development trajectory. We contribute to innovations towards animal free testing (e.g. ‘organs-on-a-chip’, candidate selection directly in humans using microdosing and AMS). We develop and offer  tools and models that predict biological outcomes of the modulation of a biological process or protein target in-silico (risk assessment) and better mimic (personalized aspects of) physiological and disease processes in humans. Data mining tools, systems biology approaches and analytical technologies are available for identification and risk assessment of targets and identification and efficacy assessments of treatments and biomarkers.

By applying our innovations we help to lower attrition rates, enable development of precision medicine as well as lower the development costs.