ICT&health publishes news article about the HARMONY Big Data Platform

How Big Data Accelerate Research on Blood Cancers

A pan-European public-private initiative, HARMONY Alliance, demonstrates how artificial intelligence and access to data can impact advances in life sciences. By analysing data sets from different repositories, scientists want to speed up the development of new drugs and individualized therapies.

Author Artur Olesch, Editorial Board ICT&Health

Co-funded by the European Commission project has been already joined by 100 organizations from all over Europe—it’s one of the leading projects of its kind on a global scale. Since January 2021, over 70,000 data sets have been provided, which then are analysed by AI algorithms on so-called the HARMONY Big Data Platform.

Researchers focus on finding answers to four questions: How can we diagnose patients faster and more precisely? What are the best practices in clinical management that could help doctors make decisions related to treatment? How can we fulfil the neglected needs of patients suffering from blood cancers? How can we accelerate progress in the development of new drugs?

The answers could be hidden in the data. However, the task is challenging—data uploaded into the Platform comes from different sources and is stored in various formats. Firstly, they have to be harmonized to make them comparable and analysable.

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