Estonia’s state-owned Metrosert and Owkin announced a collaboration on 29 September 2026 to evaluate Owkin’s K Pro platform using selected Estonian health-data cohorts within secure national infrastructure.
Key points
- The first phase will focus on selected health-data cohorts, according to the partners’ Business Wire release.
- The evaluation concerns how approved researchers could use K Pro while working inside Estonia’s secure national infrastructure.
- Metrosert and Owkin will also explore oncology as a research area in which linked clinical, molecular, imaging and treatment-outcome data could support future work.
Selected Estonian cohorts for K Pro
The partners said they will assess how K Pro could help approved researchers analyse complex Estonian health data without moving that work outside secure national infrastructure. They described reproducible analysis, faster scientific work and the preservation of data sovereignty as aims of the collaboration.
The first phase is directed at selected cohorts rather than Estonia’s health-data holdings as a whole. The partners said they will examine whether the country’s existing data and digital infrastructure can support research capability that can be used again across projects.
That scope matters for the type of work being proposed. The collaboration is an evaluation of how researchers could use the platform with national data, while the partners’ stated ambitions extend to scientific research and Estonia’s appeal to international life-sciences investment.
The partners described Estonia’s health and biomedical data holdings as population-scale. They said the collaboration will explore how those assets can be used for AI-enabled research while keeping the work within the country’s secure infrastructure.
Metrosert’s five applied research fields
Metrosert is a state-owned applied research organisation serving as a Research Technical Organisation for Estonia. Its Applied Research Center works across five fields: health data, uncrewed aircraft, self-driving transport, applications involving the lightest chemical element and the refining of biological materials.
The organisation also maintains and develops Estonia’s national measurement standards. Its wider work includes scientific and development services, applied research, and measurement and instrument control, according to the partners’ release.
Minister of Economic Affairs Liina Vahtras said Estonia had spent years building digital infrastructure and health-data capabilities. She presented the Owkin collaboration as a way to explore whether sovereign AI could strengthen the country’s use of health data for research.
For Metrosert, the proposed work sits within its health-data field. The initial use of selected cohorts gives the organisation and Owkin a defined starting point for testing the research approach they announced.
Owkin’s platform and oncology research
Owkin describes K Pro as an AI scientist platform for pharmaceutical research and strategic decision-making. The company says it brings together agentic AI, biomedical tools, multimodal data and scientific workflows in a research environment designed for sensitive data.
The evaluation will test that proposed research use within Estonia’s national infrastructure. Owkin says K Pro coordinates AI tools and skills to investigate complex biology, while the collaboration centres on how approved researchers could apply it to Estonian data.
Thomas Clozel, Owkin’s chief executive and co-founder, said the partnership was intended to use sovereign AI to turn national biomedical data into scientific discoveries and stronger research capability. He also identified better patient outcomes as an eventual goal.
Metrosert and Owkin said they will explore oncology among the potential research areas. In that field, they identified links between clinical records, molecular information, imaging and treatment outcomes as data that could support future biomedical research.
