Blood cancers, or hematologic cancers, account for about 40% of cancer cases in children and about one third of cancer deaths. Important blood cancers are leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. The cancers affect the production and function of various blood cells. There is a need for improved treatments for blood cancers. Individual cancers usually need specific therapies. Bone marrow transplant is still a common option, as are chemotherapy and radiation therapy. As many blood cancers are rare and healthcare practice varies across Europe, a lack of data on relevant outcomes represents a challenge for clinicians, researchers, and other decision-makers like regulators and HTA bodies, resulting in limitations for patient access to the best healthcare. The HARMONY Alliance aims to use "Big Data and Big Data analytics" to deliver information that will help to improve the care of patients with these diseases.
For blood cancers, BigData means information on patients and disease which is currently distributed across individual databases from clinical trials and registries in different countries. The HARMONY Alliance is orchestrating the consolidation of all databases onto one common platform. This will harness the enormous potential of BigData and BigData analytics to deliver insights into how the care of patients with blood cancers can be improved.
HARMONY's partners from industry are providing access to clinical trials data, showing how drugs work in controlled circumstances. HARMONY's public partners are providing registries to collect data on how patients are treated and the outcomes of therapies in the real world. Together, these sources are greater than the sum of their parts. For example, by combining the populations from several clinical trials, it is possible to analyze populations with rare diseases with greater statistical power than individual databases can provide. Other Big Data analyses can reveal molecular data on genomes, what proteins are expressed in different cancers, how treatments affect the expression of important genes and more.
Public-private partnership for Big Data in Hematology
HARMONY and HARMONY PLUS are funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), Europe's largest public-private initiative aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. Funding is received from the IMI 2 Joint Undertaking and is listed under grant agreement for HARMONY No. 116026 and grant agreement for HARMONY PLUS No. 945406. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).
HARMONY Coordination Office
Institute of Biomedical Research of
Salamanca (IBSAL)
Salamanca, Spain
HARMONY Communications
European Hematology Association (EHA)
The Hague, The Netherlands
