Haematological malignancies, also known as blood cancers, are a diverse and complex group of diseases that are difficult to diagnose and treat. Nowadays most treatments are extremely complex, and advances in patient diagnosis and treatment are slow due to the… Read more low number of patients per centre. There is therefore a need to harmonise, store, and analyse the current information on these diseases to speed up and support the decision-making process for patient access to new therapies. IMI’s HARMONY project is using big data to advance our understanding of the following seven blood cancers: acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL); acute myeloid leukaemia (AML); chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL); multiple myeloma (MM); myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS); non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL); and paediatric haematologic malignancies. HARMONY has set up a Big Data platform to support its work. The aim of HARMONY PLUS is to build on HARMONY’s work. Firstly, it will add the following blood cancers to the list of diseases under study: chronic myeloid leukemia, polycythaemia vera, essential thrombocythaemia, and myelofibrosis; as well as Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Waldenström macroglobulinemia and other rare blood cancers not covered by HARMONY. In addition, HARMONY PLUS will help to convert the existing HARMONY platform into an integrated services platform that could serve clinicians to improve their decision making process and support clinical trial design, among other things. Like HARMONY, HARMONY PLUS is part of IMI’s Big Data for Better Outcomes programme, which aims to facilitate the use of diverse data sources to deliver results that reflect health outcomes of treatments that are meaningful for patients, clinicians, regulators, researchers, healthcare decision-makers, and others.

Instand-NGS4P is a 54-month PCP project federating 7 leading medical centers (two are coordinating ERNs) as buyers’ group with major experience in using different NGS platforms in research and routine diagnostics. The consortium is further strengthened by European patient advocacy… Read more groups, a standardization organization and partners participating in the European infrastructures BBMRI-ERIC, ELIXIR as well as several NGS-related EU programs to cover all technical aspects and transversal needs & requirements. Driven by patient and clinical needs, innovative NGS workflows from sample-preanalytics to medical decision making will be developed. The modular design of the workflow will particularly enable SEMs to contribute, and provides flexibility to adopt emerging user needs and technologies. Specifications will address regulatory requirements for IVDs and refer to international standards and requests development of reference materials and implementation of EQA schemes covering the whole workflow. R&D suppliers will be selected based on a public tender all along this PCP process in 3 phases according to the best-value for money solution. The 3 phases foresee the leverage of 4 technical modules (pre-analytics, sequencing, bioinformatics, e-reporting/e-medication) and their standardized interfaces – from design (Phase 1) to prototypes (Phase 2), and full integration in Phase 3. At the end, this PCP will provide 2 fully integrated, standardized NGS workflows for routine diagnostics of common and rare cancers from adults to children. In order to enable broad implementation in healthcare systems throughout Europe and beyond and to increase benefit to patients a series of support activities are planned including communication and dissemination activities targeting a broad stakeholder community, development of training and education material for healthcare professionals and patients, health economic assessment and engagement with healthcare payers and policy makers.

OPERAS-P (Preparation) project will support the development of OPERAS, the European Research infrastructure for open access publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The project will further the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific,… Read more technical and community maturity. To achieve this goal, OPERAS-P will address the necessary requirements according the Work Programme with three objectives: supporting the ESFRI application, start the implementation of innovative services, and support the expansion of the consortium. First objective will include the conceptual framework for a Governance plan, including a vision statement and two Landscape Studies: one per country, one for end-users. This work will include a business model addressing the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure. In parallel, this work will be supported by the implementation of the AISBL statutes in the infrastructure. The implementation of innovative services will address the development of a transnational access to publication services, based on the adoption of common standards, the interoperability between publishing services and bridging towards the EOSC marketplace. This work will rely on the problematics identified in the White Paper OPERAS-P will support the development of the consortium with an outreach strategy based on the Landscape Study. This body of work will stand in the continuity of the work already realized in former project OPERAS-D, in particular the Design Study.

RENOIR is a European Training Network that brings together 13 beneficiaries (10 academic and 3 industrial), and 2 partner organizations (a private Onlus Foundation and a pharmaceutical company) to train 13 Early Stage Researchers with an interdisciplinary profile for outstanding… Read more carriers as leaders in the field of muscle regeneration and aging. Receiving a training programme in both scientific and transferable skills and using unique expertise and tools at the frontier between biology and engineering, this new generation of versatile researchers will dissect the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying impaired muscle composition and function, paving the way to new therapeutic interventions for muscle disease and aging. This will happen through collaborative and synergistic projects between academia and industry.

ARCH is a network of highly qualified experts in experimental hematology created to decipher the causal relationship between the physiological changes in the hematopoietic system during lifespan and the parallel occurrence of specific agerelated hematological diseases (pediatric, adult, elderly), with… Read more the aim to develop novel targeted therapeutic treatments. ARCH research will integrate the results from complementary model systems (cell lines, mouse models, cells from leukemia patients) and it will deploy a large panel of cutting-edge technologies, such as single cells genomics, epigenomics, genome editing and organoid cultures, in a multi-faceted effort. The ARCH ambitious goal requires scientific and financial resources beyond the capability of a single group. To reach this goal, the ARCH network brings together 15 beneficiaries (12 academic, 2 SMEs and 1 private research institute) and 4 Partner organisations (2 academic, 1 SME and 1 patients’ association). Two European Consortia are present through their italian nodes. ARCH will recruit 15 ESRs that will be all enrolled in PhD programmes. Besides research laboratory work, the ARCH training programme includes scientific, technical and transferable skills courses that will provide ESRs with a solid scientific culture and with awareness of responsible research and innovation issues. This broad portfolio will enable ESRs to become leading academic, clinic or industrial players in the field. The unique combination of scientific excellence, quality of the educational programme and experience in translating basic research into exploitable results will provide ARCH with the real possibility of positively contributing to the enhancement of European competitiveness in the development of innovative, targeted drugs/treatments for hematological diseases, which currently represent a serious socio-economical problem for the European health care system.