HARMONY Alliance highlights of 2022

#bigdataforbloodcancer, HARMONY, HARMONY PLUS

After six years of joint work, the HARMONY Alliance reaped the benefits of building a research infrastructure with the best brains of European blood cancer research.

Through a wide variety of collaborative activities, HARMONY has truly demonstrated the power of Big Data to improve the treatment of Hematologic Malignancies (HMs).

Advancing the understanding of blood cancers

In HARMONY research projects, scientists and physicians team up to produce novel insights into the biology of HMs. They run new algorithms and perform analyses on the thousands of anonymized data sets stored in the HARMONY Big Data Platform to detect relevant patterns. The results may be used to identify high-risk patients with greater reliability and to guide treatment choices in the future.
In 2022 our researchers:

identified gene combinations that are associated with prognosis in two subtypes of AML. Read the 1st ASH abstract > | Read the 2nd ASH Abstract > | Read the article in ASH Clinical News >
found a genetic marker for poor treatment response in adults with a subtype of ALL. Read the ASH abstract >
found factors that contribute to the clinical outcome of AML patients treated prior to the approval of novel drugs. Read the ASH abstract > | View the ASH poster >
identified a low-risk subgroup of ALL that could be considered for treatment reduction. Read the ASH abstract > | View the ASH poster >
proposed a revision of the international staging system for MM. Read our press release > | View the publication in the Journal of Clinical Oncology >
presented new insights into the prognosis of patients with AML. | Read the press release > | View the abstract in HemaSphere of EHA >

Developing Core Outcome Sets

Defining a Core Outcome Set (COS) for HMs may improve the interpretation and comparability of clinical trials, especially if the COS addresses the needs of all stakeholders. Therefore, the HARMONY Alliance has developed COS with input from patients, clinicians, industry, and regulators/Health Technology Assessment bodies. The results can form the basis for future improvements in patient management.

In 2022 an overarching COS for AML, NHL, MDS, MM, CLL, CML, MPN, HL, and WM was presented. In addition, a novel Delphi Hackathon approach was developed to define COS. Read the abstract > | View the poster >

Organizing multi-stakeholder projects

The HARMONY Alliance brings together European scientists, physicians, patients, and other stakeholders with expertise in HMs. In addition to biomedical research projects, they are running Health Technology Assessment projects and organizing multi-stakeholder activities.

In 2022 our experts concluded that value frameworks currently used to evaluate the clinical value of novel therapies for HMs make insufficient use of routine care data and patient-reported outcomes, read more > | View the paper in Elsevier Science Direct >
In 2022 the HARMONY Patient Cluster ensured that HARMONY’s results are relevant to patients. Read about the importance of patient involvement and Patient Reported Outcomes in data-driven blood cancer research >

Consolidating our infrastructure

The HARMONY Big Data Platform facilitates state-of-the-art blood cancer research. Careful procedures ensure the anonymization and quality of the data. In addition, HARMONY data scientists have developed sophisticated methods for data harmonization and analysis. In 2022 we have identified more than 150,000 patient datasets for the HARMONY Big Data Platform and have transferred more than 73,000 datasets into the Platform, view details in our data barometer >

Spreading and exchanging knowledge

The HARMONY Alliance has been working hard to speed up research on HMs in the past six years. More than 100 organizations from 18 European countries already share our mission to personalize treatments for blood cancer patients.

We participated and presented in a variety of international events such as EBMT2022 by the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation, EMN2022 by the European Myeloma Network, EHA2022 by the European Hematology Association, and ASH2022 by the American Society for Hematology.
We organized a vibrant General Assembly, which enabled 150 HARMONY Alliance experts to exchange knowledge about the latest research results, and discuss the value of data standardization and QoL data. Additional program features contained interaction about the post-IMI-funded period, watch our impression video >

#BigDataforbloodcancer | Big Data accelerate better and faster treatment for Patients with Hematologic Malignancies

The HARMONY Alliance is a Public-Private Partnership for Big Data in Hematology including over 100 organizations such as European medical associations, hospitals, research institutes, patient organizations, pharmaceutical and IT companies.

The HARMONY Alliance is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) (now called Innovative Health Initiative, IHI) of the European Commission and is currently running two projects: HARMONY (January 2017-June 2023) and HARMONY PLUS (October 2020-September 2023). In addition to the research projects that exploit the HARMONY Big Data Platform, the HARMONY Alliance is running Delphi surveys to develop core outcome sets for HMs, as well as Health Technology Assessment projects and multi-stakeholder activities.

HARMONY uses Big Data analytics to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for blood cancer patients. Data are stored in the HARMONY Big Data Platform, which has already identified over 150,000 anonymized patient records, making it one of the largest databases of its kind. Leading research teams are currently using this wealth of information to answer critical questions about hematologic malignancies that cannot be addressed with other methods.

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