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Big Data accelerate better and faster treatment for Patients with Hematologic Malignancies

The HARMONY Alliance uses big data technologies to improve the treatment of blood cancers i.e. Hematologic Malignancies. These are cancers that affect the blood and lymphatic system. In recent decades, diagnosis and treatment of these diseases has substantially improved, but many remain incurable. Taken together, hematologic malignancies rank third after lung cancer and colorectal cancer in terms of age-adjusted mortality in Europe. 

HARMONY focus: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) | Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) | Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) | Multiple Myeloma (MM) | Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) | Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (NHL) | Pediatric Hematologic Malignancies

HARMONY PLUS focus: Myeloproliferative (MPN) disorders and other Hematological Malignancies; Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), Polycythaemia Vera (PV), Essential Thrombocythemia (ET), Myelofibrosis; Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Waldenström Macroglobulinaemia and other rare blood cancers.

The key outstanding questions in this field can only be answered by studying large numbers of patients. Therefore, the HARMONY Alliance developed the HARMONY Big Data Platform, assembling harmonized clinical data from over 100.000 of European patients (update December 2021). This will enable the HARMONY researchers to characterize the molecular landscape of the various blood cancers, understand their pathophysiology, and identify novel drug targets. In addition, it will allow to reliably predict disease course and drug response for subgroups of patients. Ultimately, this should result in tools to rapidly select the most promising treatment strategy for a particular patient (i.e. personalized medicine). In parallel, the HARMONY Alliance is developing core outcome sets for blood cancers. These may assist researchers in selecting outcomes for future trials, thereby promoting harmonization of HM studies and improving clinical management of the diseases.