The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has approved HARMONY, a project that aims to foster better access and care for patients with various haematologic malignancies (HM) with the use of big data.

The project is made up of 51 partners from 11 European countries, including 7 pharmaceutical companies.

HARMONY will capture, integrate, analyse and harmonise anonymous patient data from high-quality multidisciplinary sources to unlock valuable knowledge on multiple myeloma (MM), acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL), non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL), myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and paediatric HMs.

Building on pre-existing, long-lasting collaborations between Academic institutes and the pharmaceutical industry, the HARMONY project shall further advance HM management through a more efficient process of treatment development and rapid decision-making.

The expected outcome will be better prognosis and quicker life-saving decisions, important for patients suffering from these haematological diseases.

The project brings together key stakeholders in the clinical, academic, patient, HTA (health technology assessment), regulatory, economical, 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 HMs 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 which integrates outcome measures and endpoint definitions for HMs. HARMONY will achieve this from a pan-European perspective by uniting and aligning European stakeholders and key opinion leaders in the field.

The 5-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.

Harmony is coordinated by two public leads: Prof. Dr. Jesús Marïa Hernández from Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca, Spain, and Dr. Guillermo Sanz from Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria del Hospital La Fe de Valencia, Spain, and by two EFPIA leads, Tayyab Salimullah from Novartis Oncology and Pam Bacon from Celgene International.