A European joint project develops tools for personalized medicine for the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular diseases
Keywords:HUS participates in the NextGen project funded by the European Union, UKRI and SERI, promoting research in cardiovascular diseases and their individualized treatment.
Genetic information is more easily available than ever before as the costs of laboratory analyses are falling and AI technologies enable the combination of enormous amounts of data,” says HUS’s representative in the project, Chief Physician Petra Ijäs from Neurocenter.
Jointly, cardiovascular diseases, especially myocardial infarction and stroke, are the most common cause of death worldwide, causing almost 18 million deaths every year. In Europe, one out of three deaths are caused by them. The costs caused by these diseases are high, and it is estimated than they will continue to increase. In the European Union, EUR 282 billion per year is spent on their treatment. Furthermore, cardiovascular diseases often lead to reduced functional capacity and work ability, thus causing a considerable burden both to the individuals themselves and to society.
“Personalized medicine, in which the prevention and treatment of diseases is tailored according to the patient’s unique genome and risk factors, provides opportunities to reduce this burden of cardiovascular diseases. Genetic information is more easily available than ever before as the costs of laboratory analyses are falling and AI technologies enable the combination of enormous amounts of data,” says HUS’s representative in the project, Chief Physician Petra Ijäs from Neurocenter.
However, the large amount of data, the complicated data security and administrative requirements, and the different data models and standards that are in use across Europe make the utilization of the data more difficult.
The NextGen project develops tools for combining different types of data in a way that ensures the data security of the individual while still making it possible to use the data in research. The effectiveness of the methods in removing the current obstacles to data integration will be shown in practical pilot studies.
HUS’s strength is in the utilization of artificial intelligence
HUS participates in the NextGen project by developing tools and methods for personalized medicine that take advantage of artificial intelligence and federated machine learning. This aims at individualizing the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, including ischemic stroke.
“HUS’s strength is its diverse competence in the research of stroke and other cardiovascular diseases and in the utilization of artificial intelligence. We aim at building a data ecosystem, called Pathfinder, which will be used to test how innovations work in practice in the management, cataloguing, computation and advanced data integration,” Ijäs explains.
The Pathfinder platform will be used to examine the risk factors of stroke and myocardial infarction in patients suffering from atherosclerotic carotid stenosis and the aim is to find means of individualizing the treatment.
Funding totalling more than EUR 10 million
The NextGen project launched for 4 years in January 2024 has received EUR 7.6 million from the EU, a grant of EUR 3.1 million from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation as well as funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The large consortium behind the project consists of twenty-one members, including Utrecht University Hospital, Queen Mary University of London, Karolinska Institutet, Mydata Global, and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).
Read more on the website of the NextGen project
Enquiries: Petra Ijäs, Neurocenter, petra.ijas@hus.fi
NextGen project is funded by
- European Union’s Horizon Europe, under grant agreement No 101136962
- UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK governement’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee, grant agreements No 10098097, No 10104323
- the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI)