The Harmony Alliance is an unprecedented Big-Data-driven initiative in the fight against blood cancers. Its partners include 51 key organizations from all the following fields: clinical, academic, patients, healthcare technology assessment, legislation, economic, ethical and pharmaceutical.

In the first phase Harmony aims to set up an ethical and legal framework on the use of medical data, analyzing the first platform data and defining sets of standard results.

In the words of Inmaculada Pérez Garro, GMV’s Head of Big Data Healthcare Projects, during this first stage of the project “We have tackled the challenge of harmonizing patient-protection data legislation under a single framework to be able to work with a common model adhering to the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable y reusable) data exchange principles”.

As from today “We can now go on to make further headway in the recording, processing and harmonization of huge volumes of data that will later help us to obtain evidence on the behavior of blood cancers like acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, chronic lymphoblastic leukemia, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, myelodysplastic syndromes and pediatric hematologic diseases”.

One non-technological factor that also called for a big effort was the definition and design of procedures allowing users to ask the platform questions and obtain evidence. To this end, as explained by Pérez Garro “We have liaised with various specialists among the partners making up the public-private HARMONY consortium: engineers, members of ethical committees, legal specialists, clinicians, etc, to agree on the best solutions from the various standpoints”.

Applying advanced analytical techniques to the huge volumes of data uploaded into the Big Data platform, GMV will be furnishing information that enables specialists to analyze the behavior and evolution of these diseases in different habitats, characterize them more specifically, identifying molecular, genetic and clinical markers that flag up the population affected by a given disease. This will contribute towards “The development of new therapies capable of personalizing treatment and providing benefits for patients such as avoiding exposure to unnecessary toxicity levels” argued the executive.