HARMONY

IMI’s big data projects will promote their activities at the BioDataWorld Congress 2019 in Basel, Switzerland, on 4-5 December 2019. The projects will share their approach to improving health outcomes### in the following sessions:

• The pro’s and con’s of the different IMI projects approaches. IT and high-tech aspects (Roundtable 27, 4 December at 11:40)
• The need for data communities in Europe, and why should you care? (Roundtable 25, 5 December at 11:40)
• It is now or never! Connecting data communities with clinical research communities (Lunchtime panel, 5 December at 12:30)
• Connecting the dots to benefit patients: This is how we do it, but we need you too! (IMI Showcase, 5 December at 15:10)

The projects participating in these sessions are: HARMONY (big data and blood cancers), EHDEN (health data and evidence network), BigData@Heart (big data and heart disease), PIONEER (big data and prostate cancer), and ROADMAP (big data and Alzheimer’s disease). All projects are part of IMI’s Big Data for Better Outcomes programme.

• Get the details of the IMI projects’ involvement in the event
• Visit the conference website

IMI’s HARMONY project has captured data on 45 000 patients with blood cancers, meaning it is almost half way to achieving its goal of collecting data on at least 100 000 patients during the lifetime of the project. The data, which comes from multiple sources such as clinical trials and registries, is gathered in the project’s Big Data Platform. HARMONY researchers are already mining it to answer research questions such as whether one specific treatment improves outcomes in patients with aggressive multiple myeloma, and which subgroups of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes benefit from certain treatments. ‘Mining this unique Big Data Platform to address pressing research questions will give us better insight in the molecular landscape of blood cancers and the prognostic value of disease related variables, hence increasing our understanding of their pathophysiology. Making use of big data analytics in blood cancer research will lead us faster to identifying novel drug targets,’ says Bruno Costa of Celgene, representing the EFPIA members in HARMONY. ‘Ultimately, our goal is that, together, we can accelerate drug development, regulatory evaluation, access appraisal, and treatment strategies to improve the care of patients with these blood cancers.’

Partners in blood cancer alliance HARMONY have uploaded the first datasets into the HARMONY Big Data Platform. This is a major milestone for the large alliance that aims to improve the treatment of haematologic malignancies. This first batch of data focuses on acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a form of blood cancer that is most common in the over 75s. ###There are effective treatments for AML, but many elderly and weaker patients are not strong enough to tolerate the intensive chemotherapy regimens. Improved insight into the molecular basis of the disease is essential to develop better treatments for these patients. This requires data from thousands of patients. Therefore, HARMONY is bringing together datasets from all over Europe. The datasets that were recently uploaded into the Big Data Platform are from the German Austrian AML Study Group (AMLSG); the Haemato Oncology Foundation for Adults in the Netherlands (HOVON); and Novartis’s RATIFY trial. More HARMONY Partners are ready to transfer their data to the platform as well. ‘With such positive efforts in sharing aggregated data of hundreds of patients, the hope is that other data custodians across industry and academia will also be inspired to join the HARMONY Alliance’, said HARMONY project lead Mirko Vukcevic from Novartis. ‘In the future, the aspiration is that the HARMONY Alliance model will allow us to create a blueprint that can be applied to future projects in other disease areas, ultimately benefiting many more patients in Europe and well beyond.’ HARMONY is a unique network of more than 80 public-private organizations. It is part of IMI’s Big Data for Better Outcomes programme.