CHE to participate in a new EU H2020 IMI2 funded project aiming to identify faster, more effective and cost-effective care for patients with haematological malignancies

Posted on 31 January 2017

Patients struggling with blood disorders may look forward to more rapid and efficient treatment from the outcomes of the HARMONY project, an initiative that aims to create a roadmap for better access and care for patients with various blood diseases with the use of big data.

Harmony logo

The Centre for Health Economics, through Prof Andrea Manca, is participating as partner in the EU Horizon 2020 funded project, Healthcare Alliance for Resourceful Medicine Offensive against Neoplasms in heamatologY (HARMONY).

With 51 partners from 11 European countries, including 7 pharmaceutical companies and patients organisations participating in this 5-year programme of research, HARMONY investigators will collate, organise and analyse multiple anonymous patient-level data to unlock valuable knowledge on multiple myeloma (MM), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL), myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and blood disorders in infants and children.

HARMONY will build on pre-existing, long-lasting collaborations between academics, clinicians, patient organisations and the pharmaceutical industry. It will further advance management of haematological malignancies through a more efficient process of treatment development and rapid decision-making. The expected outcome will be better prognosis, faster and more efficient treatment decisions, and a more personalised approach to the management of blood oncological disorders.

The project brings together key players and stakeholders in the clinical, academic, patient, HTA (health technology assessment), epidemiology, regulatory, health economics, ethical and pharmaceutical fields to:

Developing a data sharing platform that empowers clinicians and policy stakeholders to improve decision-making
Establishing a network reflecting the European haematological malignancies landscape
Defining clinical endpoints and standard outcomes in ALL (paediatric & adult), NHL, MM, AML, CLL, MDS
Alignment of key stakeholders on relevance of these outcomes (policy makers, payers, patients)
Providing means for analysing complex data sets comprising different layers of information
Identifying specific markers for early registration of innovative and effective therapies for HMs

The HARMONY project's final deliverable is a big data platform that will integrate disease information in order to better understand the diseases and how to treat most efficiently. HARMONY will achieve this from a pan-European perspective by uniting and aligning European stakeholders and key opinion leaders in the field. The five-year project will start in January 2017 and is 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.