Obesity is one of the fastest growing epidemics, not only in the western world, but also in developing countries. Mexico, for example, has the second highest obesity rate in the world and nearly one third of women are overweight in Africa. By 2015, it is predicted that some 2.3 billion adults around the world will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.

Overweight people tend to have a higher risk for problems such as coronary heart disease, type II diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and some cancers. Health researchers predict the current young generation will be the first in human history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents due to the rapid rise of juvenile and adolescent obesity.

Understanding and treating obesity and the associated health risks is not as simple as stepping on the scale. While four out of five type II diabetics are overweight, only a small proportion of the overweight population suffers from diabetes. A key risk factor is abdominal fat (often referred to as belly fat). Abdominal fat is known to increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome. But it is difficult to measure accurately. Waist-to-hip ratio offers only a rough rule of thumb. CT scans are accurate but not suitable for routine testing due to the associated costs and X-ray exposure levels.

A Vison Of Heathcare: Preventing Disease

GE’s vision is “personalized healthcare,” which plays a part in the company’s healthymagination program. Personalized care involves providing technologies to clinicians around the world and determining new ways to predict, prevent, diagnose and treat disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE has long worked with scientists, physicians, hospitals and health authorities to develop, improve and make available medical imaging technologies that help health professionals “see and treat” disease better. But the ambition to actively prevent disease means that the collaborative net now needs to be spread more widely. Managing health holistically means thinking about people as individuals and as consumers, not just as patients. This would involve working with partners beyond the scientific and medical worlds, and with the sectors such as food production, education and media that reach individuals before they become ill.

Collaborative Innovation

The GE Global Research Center (GRC) is the company’s powerhouse for innovation — it operates like an in-house university; advancing knowledge, bringing together teams from different areas of research and nurturing technologies ahead of the market. Scientists and engineers at the GRC work together with all GE businesses to develop and drive new technology development. They are uniquely positioned to advance the underlying science and cross-pollinate technological developments between the company’s different business interests and generate new ideas. It is at the GRC where scientists can explore a new idea and see if they can demonstrate its potential.

Looking For Synergies, Listening To Stakeholders

In 2007, Fiona Ginty, a bioinformatics scientist at the GRC, initiated the idea to create a new kind of collaboration with a partner outside of the medical field. Ginty had previously worked at Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, and had seen that many of the challenges that Nestlé was approaching from a nutritional perspective were complementary with GE’s diagnostic approach. The fit between Nestlé and GE was clear: Nestlé is interested in personalized nutrition, GE in personalized health. Nestlé conducts extensive research on the effects of diet and lifestyle on health, and is a global business that touches consumers as they shop, cook and manage their weight.

Although there was a natural fit between GE and Nestlé’s goals for individualized health, it was difficult to know where to start without a specific problem to solve. Teams from the two companies began to meet to learn about each other’s business and research priorities. They explored a number of possibilities for working together.

In parallel, David Ergun, Chief Scientist for Lunar, GE Healthcare’s unit for a range of bone densitometry scanners (DXA), was also involved in a dialogue about how GE’s technologies could be applied in disease prevention. The Lunar DXA scanners were originally designed to aide in the diagnosis of bone diseases such as osteoporosis. However, researchers working in nutrition, diabetes, metabonomics and other areas of obesity research and treatment were increasingly using the DXA scanner to measure fat and muscle distribution.

These researchers and clinicians found DXA could be an accurate and precise method for creating a detailed map of fat and muscle distribution in the body. They were able to measure changes that resulted from weight-loss programs, and gauge the effects of the unique imaging capabilities of DXA on motivating patients to stick with the program. In short, DXA could offer an easy and cost-effective method to make the type of measurements previously available only through technologies such as CT and MRI.

GE Healthcare engineers worked on developing a new generation of scanners to meet the need for a body composition as well as bone density. They developed the Lunar iDXA with built-in capabilities for body composition as well as bone densitometry. The GE Healthcare engineers were confident that the machine was accessible, cost effective and accurate, but to more fully demonstrate its usefulness, they needed broader collaboration.

In 2008, these two conversations came together when Ginty and Ergun met at a scientific conference on bone health. They realized that advancing the Lunar’s application in body composition imaging was an ideal area for GE and Nestlé to collaborate.

A Partnership In Action

GE and Nestlé embarked on a series of clinical research studies to better understand the relationship between body composition and metabolic health. GE provides the expertise in measurement, and Nestlé has the know-how to evaluate metabolic markers for health and disease. For GE, the outcome is refinement of its diagnostic tools, and for Nestlé it is creation of better nutritional products for healthy living.

Using the Lunar iDXA, Nestlé can now measure fat distribution in combination with metabolic health profiles in obese patients with the CHUV hospital in Lausanne. They are also evaluating the accuracy and precision of the iDXA measurements.

The collaboration has not just focused on this study but has become a meeting of minds. GE scientists and engineers say that working with Nestlé has been valuable not just in validating the technology through their collaboration, but because it has helped them to advance their own thinking about the links between health, disease and lifestyle and the role that diagnostic technologies can play in prevention as well as treatment.

The GE and Nestlé teams are now going beyond the original collaboration to think about other ways to improve health through the linkage between nutrition, body composition and disease risk. For GE, better understanding of the link between health and nutrition might extend to leveraging GE’s entertainment and domestic appliance businesses in helping people to manage their weight and reduce health risks

Learning To Collaborate, Colloaborating To Learn

Realizing the full health potential of the Lunar imaging tool and nutritional approaches to healthcare at GE will require further research and collaboration, for example, to understand health risks in different ethnic groups and in relation to genetic factors and local healthcare priorities. Developing accessible affordable solutions will also be important, since obesity is affecting both low- and high-income countries. Tackling societal needs for sustainable health require a combination of public, private and individual collaboration.

The GE-Nestlé collaboration is just the first step to kick start this process. It has resulted in learning, not just about body composition, but also about the important process of collaborative innovation.

Key Success Factors Of The GE-Nestlé Collaboration

• Identifying a shared interest. It helped that GE and Nestlé have shared values and common goals in promoting health and wellness, but what really got the collaboration moving was the identification of a specific common interest, which would advance both partners individual aims.
• Fostering individual connections into institutional collaboration. Fiona Ginty’s personal connections at GE and Nestlé were critical to getting the collaboration started, but from there it became embedded in both companies, through teams of people and links to the business strategy.
• Building up trust on both sides. Transparency, communication and clear roles and responsibilities have been crucial to the smooth operation of the project. Twice yearly meetings and weekly phone calls have enabled the collaborative team not just to coordinate, plan and track progress, but to share learning and think about what is next.
• Learning and evolving. The initial collaboration has been fruitful not only in meeting its initial project goals but in advancing thinking about the possibilities for further synergies.