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Article: HARMONY
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7th October 2020
THE HARMONY ALLIANCE LAUNCHES HARMONY PLUS, A NEW PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP TO IMPROVE OUTCOMES FOR PATIENTS WITH BLOOD CANCERS

HARMONY PLUS will build upon the success of HARMONY, which is currently using the power of Big Data to speed up the development of improved treatments and more effective strategies for patients with blood cancers.


In addition to expanding the focus to other hematologic malignancies that were not initially covered by HARMONY, HARMONY PLUS Integrated Services will boost the power of Big Data by collaborating with other international big data initiatives. New Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques will be applied to enhance analytical capabilities and increase the accuracy of the results. By adapting the platform and tools to be used by hospitals and clinicians to improve patient outcomes, HARMONY PLUS aims to bring the results to where the patient is.

HARMONY has made rapid progress since its launch in January 2017. By the end of 2019, HARMONY had identified 45,000 data sets from patients with various types of blood cancer and is targeting a data pool of 100,000 patients during the lifetime of the project. Furthermore, the HARMONY Big Data Platform represents a unique resource, meeting the highest standards of data security and governance.

“The success seen with HARMONY calls for an expansion to include other important blood cancers currently not covered in HARMONY”, says Jesús María Hernández Rivas, IBSAL, HARMONY Coordinator, “HARMONY PLUS will enhance the value of the HARMONY Big Data Platform through greater collaborations also outside of the EU, and by enabling the use of the latest learnings and developments in the field of big data analytics and artificial intelligence  for healthcare.”

  • HARMONY PLUS builds upon the success of HARMONY in capitalizing on Big Data to speed up the development of more effective treatments for patients with blood cancers.
  • HARMONY PLUS will leverage the HARMONY Big Data Platform, a central data pool of anonymized data, collected from public and private organizations. Real World Data will be added to the platform to perform Real World Evidence research projects.
  • HARMONY PLUS will use data from the HARMONY Big Data Platform as a virtual control arm to support clinical trial design in the hematologic malignancies field.
  • HARMONY PLUS will expand the focus of HARMONY to additional blood diseases and apply new Artificial Intelligence techniques.
  • HARMONY PLUS: 39 Partners from 10 countries. Budget 12 million. Period: October 2020 – September 2023
  • HARMONY: 53 Partners and 41 Associated Members, including 7 European Patient Organizations from 17 countries. Budget: 40 million | January 2017- December 2021
  • 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 aims at capturing, integrating, analysing, and harmonising anonymous patient data from high-quality multidisciplinary sources to unlock valuable knowledge on haematological diseases for a better prognosis and quicker life-saving decisions for patients.

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