A European project to advance big data-driven cardiovascular research has launched with EU and pharma backing.
Novartis, Bayer, Servier and Vifor Pharma are among those participating in BigData@Heart, a five-year, €19m project supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
Its overarching aim is to improve patient outcomes and reduce the burden on society of atrial fibrillation (AF), heart failure (HF) and acute coronary syndrome (ACS).
To do this the IMI consortium will develop a data-driven translational research platform to deliver clinically relevant disease phenotypes, scalable insights from real-world evidence, best-practices in drug development and personalised medicines through advanced analytics.
As part of that the partners, which also include University Medical Center Utrecht, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, European Society of Cardiology and the Karolinska Institutet, will develop:
* New disease and outcome definitions
* An informatics platforms links, visualises and harmonises data sources
* Data science techniques to develop new definitions of disease, identify new phenotypes, and construct personalised predictive models
* Cross-border big data use guidelines that acknowledge ethical and legal constraints as well as data security.
The consortium is jointly led by Prof Diederick Grobbee from the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) and Bayer’s Dr Gunnar Brobert.
Commenting at its launch the consortium said in a statement: “Drug development pipelines from early target validation through to late post-marketing work have proven to be slow and high-risk. The lack of high-resolution biomarkers and computable definitions frustrates progress in the development of successful CVD therapies.
“There is a clear need for a better definition of CVD through improved biomarkers and endpoints, as well as its outcomes and prognoses.”
For the first time, BigData@Heart will combine European-wide research data, electronic health records (EHR) in population settings, hospital based EHRs, disease quality improvement registries, clinically recorded imaging data and trial data from over 75,000 patients.
AF, HF and ACS are major drivers of cardiovascular disease (CVD), causing more than 3.9 million deaths each year across Europe and accounting for 45% of all deaths.
In addition to this human cost, CVD has a heavily financial cost for the EU of €210bn a year, around 53% of which comes from healthcare costs, 26% from productivity losses and 21% form the informal care of people with CVD.
