Launched in March 2017 and finalised in February 2023, BigData@Heart was a six-year project of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a EU public-private consortium consisting of patient networks, learned societies, SMEs, pharmaceutical companies, and academia.
BigData@Heart’s ultimate goal was to develop a Big Data-driven translational research platform of unparalleled scale and phenotypic resolution in order to deliver clinically relevant disease phenotypes, scalable insights from real-world evidence and insights driving drug development and personalised medicine through advanced analytics. To accomplish this, the BigData@Heart consortium achieved the following:
- Assembled an unparalleled array of big-data sets;
- Created a responsive and agile research framework to address the objectives;
- Created systems to leverage existing state-of-the-art solutions from different sources to enable combination for high-power identification, harmonisation, access and analysis of distributed data;
- Developed and expanded on this distributed data for further analysis;
- Created novel frameworks for disease definitions based on up-to-date scientific evidence;
- Leveraged unique database access and big data science expertise to validate (and tweak) the novel frameworks through a number of pilot studies with high and immediate social relevance;
- Involved all relevant stakeholders (including policy makers and insurers) to ensure full support for this new framework;
- Ensured proper, wide dissemination of the framework and project results, to maximise impact and speed at which the results will be broadly implemented in the EU, and so that they may serve as a template or inspiration for the rest of the world;
- Set new and durable standards for cardiovascular big-data science for the next decades.