HARMONY (Healthcare Alliance for Resourceful Medicines Offensive against Neoplasms in HematologY), is a pan European 5-year project that has officially started on 1st January 2017.
The project is made up of 51 partners, among these the University of Bologna, from 11 European countries, including 7 pharmaceutical companies.
The whole project has been granted €. 40 million in funding. The University of Bologna has been awarded 0,8 million and is involved with 2 research teams led by Giovanni Martinelli from Experimental, Diagnostic and Specialty Medicine Department (DIMES) and Gastone Castellani, from "L. Galvani" Interdepartmental Research Centre for Integrative Studies in Bioinformatics, Biophysics and Biocomplexity.
HARMONY’s aim is to capture, integrate, analyze and harmonize anonymous patient data from high-quality multidisciplinary sources 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 pediatric HMs.
Despite significant recent progress in the field of hematological malignancies (HMs), with increasing survival rates and improvement in quality of life, many children and adults with HMs still die from these disorders or experience disabling complications. Therefore, improvement of health care of HMs is an unmet medical need. Therefore it is important to define and align standard and efficient sets of HMs outcomes to measure and evaluate HM data for clinical decisions, long term risk/benefit profile, reimbursement, value analysis, and clinical trials design. Improving outcome measures and endpoint definitions by taking into account “real-life” data and differences in cross-national healthcare practice will undoubtedly result in an optimized, sustainable and effective treatment delivery, as well as in desirable and innovative accelerated pathways for novel drug availability. All these challenges will be addressed within this project.
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.
HARMONY 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.
THE INNOVATIVE MEDICINES INITIATIVE
The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is Europe's largest public-private initiative aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. IMI supports collaborative research projects and builds networks of industrial and academic experts in order to boost pharmaceutical innovation in Europe. IMI is a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA.