Healthcare alliance for resourceful medicines offensive against neoplasms in hematology – PLUS

Project information

Haematological malignancies, also known as blood cancers, are a diverse and complex group of diseases that are difficult to diagnose and treat. Nowadays most treatments are extremely complex, and advances in patient diagnosis and treatment are slow due to the low number of patients per centre. There is therefore a need to harmonise, store, and analyse the current information on these diseases to speed up and support the decision-making process for patient access to new therapies.

IMI’s HARMONY project is using big data to advance our understanding of the following seven blood cancers: acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL); acute myeloid leukaemia (AML); chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL); multiple myeloma (MM); myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS); non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL); and paediatric haematologic malignancies. HARMONY has set up a Big Data platform to support its work.

The aim of HARMONY PLUS is to build on HARMONY’s work. Firstly, it will add the following blood cancers to the list of diseases under study: chronic myeloid leukemia, polycythaemia vera, essential thrombocythaemia, and myelofibrosis; as well as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Waldenström macroglobulinemia and other rare blood cancers not covered by HARMONY.

In addition, HARMONY PLUS will help to convert the existing HARMONY platform into an integrated services platform that could serve clinicians to improve their decision-making process and support clinical trial design, among other things.

Like HARMONY, HARMONY PLUS is part of IMI’s Big Data for Better Outcomes program, which aims to facilitate the use of diverse data sources to deliver results that reflect health outcomes of treatments that are meaningful for patients, clinicians, regulators, researchers, healthcare decision-makers, and others.

• Reference: 945406
• Start date: October 1, 2020
• End date: September 30, 2023
• Nature of project: International
• Award year 2019