€19M IMI project aims to bring cardiovascular health into the genomics era
The genomics revolution has brought personalised medicine to cancer and rare diseases, but cardiovascular care is stuck in the past. An EU-funded initiative aims to change that.
By Gary Finnegan
Experts from across Europe have launched a five-year public-private research effort to apply the power of genomics and big data to cardiovascular health, in the €19 million BigData@Heart project, funded by the EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
The project is a recognition that in the face of the enormous burden of heart failure, atrial fibrillation and acute coronary syndrome, the field lags behind other major disease areas in using genomic and big data to improve patient outcomes.
It is hoped that the outputs will lead to a major revamp of clinical guidelines in cardiology. The researchers involved in BigData@Heart have been instrumental in shaping current treatment and management of heart conditions and there is an emerging consensus that these should be updated to reflect advances in big data.
“Today’s treatment guidelines reflect the scientific constraints of an earlier era where clinical markers to guide therapy were limited to conventional risk factors and end-organ damage, and where the main endpoint in clinical trials is patient death and hospitalisation,” said project member Stefan Anker of Charité University Medicine, Berlin. “Our goal is to build a much more personalised, data-driven system that brings cardiology into the ‘omics era.” Read more...
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