Today I want to echo one of the most promising initiative to improve health outcomes, healthcare systems and clinical research in Europe by maximising the potential of #BigData.
What Is BD4DO?
As they themselves define, BD4BO (Big Data For Better Outcomes) is an European research programme aiming to develop key enablers to support health care system transformation through the use of big data. The initiative will develop platforms for integrating and analysing diverse data sets, focusing on outcomes that matter to patients and generating meaningful insights that will help improve health care.
As these goals are completely in line with the mission of AutoDiscovery and Butler Scientifics I think it’s worth explaining it in detail, isn’t it?
Disease-Specific Projects
BD4BO accommodates and orchestrates several disease-specific projects so far.
ROADMAP project provides the foundation for an integrated data environment and framework for real-world evidence in Alzheimer’s Disease spectrum. This includes the development of key outcome measures and data integration tools for dataset characterisation and outcome classification.
ROADMAP has a budget of EUR 8.21 million and 26 partners led by the University of Oxford and Novartis.
Among the extensive documentation developed under this project, I would like to highlight this “Initial Overview of Potential Data Sources With RWE Data in Europe” (PDF) which provides a landscape of available real world health care data about Alzheimer’s disease at various stages.
“Big Data for better hearts” is the slogan of this consortium, which ultimate aim is to improve patient outcomes and reduce the societal burden of atrial fibrillation, acute coronary syndrome and heart failure in Europe and globally.
To reach these ambitious goals, they will develop a data-driven translational research platform of unparalleled scale and phenotypic resolution.
The first research paper published (open access) is entitled “Big data from electronic health records for early and late translational cardiovascular research: challenges and potential” and is now freely available through their website.
The HARMONY Alliance is a European network of excellence for big data in hematology. Its goal is unlocking valuable knowledge across the spectrum of hematologic malignancies (blood cancers), including multiple myeloma (MM), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL), myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), and pediatric hematologic malignancies.
HARMONY will gather together, integrate and analyze anonymous patient data from a number of high quality sources, helping the team to define clinical endpoints and outcomes for these diseases.
The HARMONY Alliance is led by Novartis (again) and Celgene, and coordinated by the Institute of Biomedical Research of Salamanca (IBSAL) and Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria La Fe.
Get Involved!
The BD4BO programme was launched in 2016 under the umbrella of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
SMEs, academia, patients, regulators and industry are welcomed to get involved in IMI projects. In their website, they explain in detail how to:
Become a partner in an IMI project
Participate in an ongoing project (e.g. European Lead Factory or ENABLE)
Propose an idea for a project
Join a project advisory board
Participate in events
Become an evaluator
Join IMI as an Associated Partner
Join European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA)
Become an IMI member