How can HARMONY help doctors to make the right decisions when treating blood cancer patients?

Novel blood cancer treatments are currently being tested in clinical trials across the world. Each trial uses its own outcomes to evaluate whether the treatment is effective. For instance, patients’ response to treatment may be described with complete remission, complete remission & Minimal Residue Disease (MRD) negative, partial remission, or stable disease. This makes it difficult to compare and combine the study results. In addition, many studies do not assess long-term side effects of the drugs. As a result, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about which treatments are optimal. A COS may offer a solution to these problems. 

A Core Outcome Set (COS) constitutes the minimum set of outcomes that should be collected and reported in future clinical trials in order to capture all relevant information, to better compare clinical trials and to advance novel treatment approaches faster. In the past, COS were often defined by individual stakeholder groups including patients, clinicians, health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry. In HARMONY, however, we now for the first time will come up with COS defined by all stakeholder groups in a collaborative effort, thereby ensuring that the new COS for hematologic malignancies will be of high value to everybody.

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