Addressing care gaps across the patient journey: insights from the 2026 UCB Startup Program Pitch Day

For people living with chronic conditions and rare diseases, better outcomes depend on improving the entire care journey, not just the care that takes place during clinical appointments. Every stage of that journey presents opportunities to improve care, from earlier diagnosis and more effective referral pathways to better-informed treatment decisions and ongoing disease management.

To address key challenges across the patient journey, UCB Germany leveraged the Startup Program, one of the mechanisms established by UCB’s Digital Care Transformation (DCTx) team in 2022. The program brings UCB teams together to define healthcare and business challenges aligned with local market priorities before identifying and exploring digital health solutions that can address those needs. Through close collaboration with UCB teams, participating companies contribute their expertise while benefiting from clinical, commercial, and market perspectives to evaluate real-world applications, generate actionable insights, and identify opportunities to improve patient outcomes.

This year’s program focused on three priority areas identified by UCB Germany: axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), myasthenia gravis (MG), and osteoporosis. Over 14 weeks, four companies worked with UCB stakeholders to explore how digital tools could support earlier identification, improve referral, inform treatment decisions, and strengthen patient engagement.

“The startups in this year’s program are asking the same questions we ask ourselves at UCB. These aren’t abstract innovation questions, they’re the everyday realities of patients, and that’s why we’re working together to find practical solutions” – Pasquale Impesi, SVP Head of Europe, UCB

Showcasing the 2026 cohort: Supporting earlier identification and diagnosis

Axial spondyloarthritis is often associated with significant diagnostic delays. For example, in Germany the delay from back-pain onset to axSpA diagnosis is almost 6 years. Symptoms are often non-specific and patients frequently visit multiple care providers before reaching a rheumatologist, delaying access to appropriate treatment and support.

Through the Startup Program, UCB collaborated with MPIRIQ to explore how AI-supported patient identification and referral could help mitigate this issue. Working alongside clinicians and UCB experts, MPIRIQ analysed routine GP records to identify patients with suspected axSpA, supported rheumatologist validation of flagged cases, and evaluated an AI-enabled referral pathway to specialist care.

Several patients flagged in the pilot had recorded clinical signs linked to inflammatory back pain, elevated inflammatory markers, or relevant testing history, but had not received a formal diagnosis. Initial rheumatologist review confirmed strong agreement with the AI-supported screening approach, demonstrating that routinely collected primary care data can help uncover overlooked patients and support earlier, more targeted referral into rheumatology care.

Rethinking osteoporosis care, from detection to treatment

Vertebral compression fractures are among the strongest predictors of future osteoporotic fractures. Yet, many remain undetected on routine scans and as a result patients at highest risk may not be assessed or connected to timely treatment. These highest-risk patients, who gain most from early guideline-directed therapy, are hiding in plain sight on scans already performed.

UCB partnered with ImageBiopsy Lab to turn that opportunity into a working methodology, built on ImageBiopsy Lab’s, IB Lab FLAMINGO AI platform, originally a UCB initiative that opportunistically detects vertebral fractures on routine CT scans and is already validated across European health systems. Together, the teams designed and validated a downstream care pathway to support osteoporosis assessment and treatment for patients identified through IB Lab FLAMINGO, addressing the lack of established post-detection services in routine care.

By closing gaps in both patient identification and treatment initiation, IB Lab FLAMINGO surfaces vertebra fractures, while the IB Lab Bridge is a tele-osteology platform that turns IB Lab FLAMINGO detection into a guideline-based, treatment-ready plan, supporting patients to receive the appropriate treatment. This approach could bring up to 35 times more high-risk patients into treatment than usual care, nearly double what detection alone achieves, lifting Germany's potential reach toward roughly 585,000 patients a year from about 16,500 today. Because prevention costs less than the fractures it averts, the pathway is built to be reimbursed through existing healthcare funding, creating a sustainable route from incidental CT scans to guideline-directed treatment.

Supporting treatment decisions

For people living with myasthenia gravis (MG), treatment decisions are often made in the context of a highly variable disease course, where symptoms and daily disease burden fluctuate considerably. Yet because specialist visits typically take place only every few months, meaningful changes between appointments can go unseen, and in a condition where muscle weakness can deteriorate quickly, that lack of visibility makes timely, well-informed treatment decisions harder.

To help close this gap, UCB collaborated with RareLink to explore whether continuous remote patient monitoring could form the foundation of a future patient support model. RareLink's certified platform combines patient-reported outcomes and connected devices to give treating physicians a clearer, more continuous picture of disease activity between visits. Working alongside neuromuscular specialists, the project mapped therapy-specific care gaps in MG and identified where digital monitoring could add the most value. This included earlier recognition of deterioration and better-informed treatment and dose optimization, to more structured symptom monitoring and follow-up. The greatest benefit is expected for the most unstable and hardest-to-reach patients. Together, these insights give UCB an evidence-based starting point for building remote monitoring into MG care within the German healthcare system.

Bringing the patient perspective into care

Also related to MG, UCB partnered with mama health to strengthen patient support and measure patient empowerment. The mama health's patient companion app supports patients across their entire disease journey - through education, community insights, and continuous guidance - and during this project, the team made significant improvements to its AI capabilities and core features while putting patient needs first. Additionally, mama health and UCB developed a Patient Empowerment Index measuring patient awareness, engagement, and activation.

One of the project's most notable findings was that patient engagement and activation lagged behind awareness. This highlights a gap between understanding and action, pointing to the value of tools that accompany patients not only at key clinical moments but at every stage of their journey.

Beyond Pitch Day

The projects presented at Pitch Day on 13 July 2026, held in Monheim, Germany, and online, showcased how the Startup Program has evolved from a startup-focused initiative into model focused on addressing specific healthcare and business challenges, enabling more relevant collaborations between startups, UCB, and the wider healthcare ecosystem.

By focusing on priorities identified by the local markets and working closely with external innovators, UCB teams assessed potential solutions, generated new insights, and had a better understanding of opportunities across axSpA, osteoporosis, and myasthenia gravis. Each collaboration addressed different challenges, yet collectively they demonstrate how targeted partnerships can accelerate learning, inform future priorities, and support UCB’s broader goal of improving patient outcomes.

Building on the insights gained from this year’s cohort, DCTx will continue working with local markets to pinpoint priority challenges and explore how external innovation can help address unmet needs across various disease areas and healthcare settings.