The European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) is a valued partner in the HARMONY Alliance. The 49th annual EBMT meeting will take place on 23-26 April 2023 in Paris. It will feature a HARMONY-EBMT joint session (JS01) on Monday 24 April 2023, 09:00 - 10:15. Join this special session, learn about Big Data innovations to rapidly select the most promising treatment for blood cancer patients and listen to the EBMT research proposals.
The HARMONY Alliance is a public-private partnership of more than 140 organizations such as hospitals, research institutes, patient organizations, pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, IT companies, and medical associations such as EBMT and EHA. Together, they have developed the HARMONY Big Data Platform with the HARMONY Datalake, which contains anonymized data records from tens of thousands of blood cancer patients. This unique research infrastructure, with advanced big data analytic and AI tools, is being used to accelerate the development of more effective treatments for patients with hematologic malignancies (blood cancers).
The HARMONY Alliance has identified more than 156,000 patient datasets for its Big Data Platform and had transferred more than 73,000 datasets into the Platform. Careful procedures have been installed to ensure the anonymization and quality of the data. In addition, HARMONY data scientists have developed sophisticated methods for data harmonization and analysis. Dedicated Research Project teams are currently using the HARMONY Big Data Platform to answer critical research questions that cannot be addressed with other methods.
The HARMONY Alliance is now reaping the benefits of the enormous investments made in the last six years. Especially in the field of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), HARMONY has delivered important new insights that may benefit patients in the future. AML has a special position in the HARMONY Alliance because it was the pilot project. The Big Data Platform contains data sets from tens of thousands of AML patients, including high-quality data on genomic mutations. A dedicated research team has discovered that the co-occurrence of certain mutations has a substantial impact on the outcome in AML patients. These mutations may thus act as biomarkers that can help clinicians to decide if a particular patient is likely to benefit from a stem cell transplantation or if a less intensive treatment would suffice. These results could not have been produced without the use of Big Data. HARMONY’s efforts in other disease fields are starting to pay off as well, delivering novel insights into the biology of a variety of hematologic malignancies.
In addition to the joint session on Monday 24 April, the HARMONY Alliance will have a booth (18 a) at the EBMT2023 exhibition. EBMT has been a HARMONY Partner right from the start and has a special role being a medical association. HARMONY and EBMT have the same major aim: to improve the outcomes of patients with hematologic malignancies. Data sharing is the key to achieve this mission. HARMONY invites members of the EBMT community to contribute data, propose research projects that exploit the HARMONY Big Data Platform, and use the associated Big Data and Artificial Intelligence tools to establish new patterns of association between data and outcomes.
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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
