European Public-private Partnership for Big Data in Hematology, HARMONY Alliance, has welcomed Pfizer as a new partner. Pfizer joins more than 50 other partners in the alliance committed to accelerating the development of new treatments and enable precision medicine in blood cancer.

In total, more than 90 multi-disciplinary contributors including academic institutions, hospitals, national clinical disease networks, patient groups and pharmaceutical companies, as well as regulatory agencies, experts in economics and ethics, and information and technology (ICT) specialists form the HARMONY Alliance

Hematological malignancies are a leading contributor to cancer incidence and mortality across Europe with a large economic burden and a significant impact on society. In addition, healthcare practice varies across countries and fragmentation and a lack of data on relevant outcomes represents a challenge for clinicians, researchers, and decision-makers alike.

The HARMONY project aims to use ‘big data’ to deliver information that will help to improve the care of patients with these diseases by gathering, integrating and analyzing anonymous patient data from a number of high-quality sources. This will help the team to define clinical endpoints and outcomes for these diseases that are recognized by all key stakeholders. The project’s data sharing platform aims to facilitate and improve decision making for policy makers and clinicians alike, to help them to give the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.

“We are very excited to have Pfizer join the HARMONY Alliance to contribute their extensive expertise in blood cancers to the growing wealth of data that we are collecting and mining,” says Jesús María Hernández Rivas from the Institute for Biomedical Research of Salamanca (IBSAL) and HARMONY coordinator.