NextGen consortium launched

The NextGen (Next Generation Tools for Genome-Centric Multimodal Data Integration in Personalised Cardiovascular Medicine) consortium was officially launched on January 1st. NextGen is a collaboration between 21 academic, clinical, technical, and commercial partners across Europe and the United States and has recently been awarded a Horizon Europe grant with a remarkable 15 out of 15 score. The project is lead by the UMC Utrecht and Queen Mary University of London.

Healthcare is the fasted growing EU27 expenditure. Personalised medicine, comprising tailored approaches for prevention, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment is essential to reduce the burden of disease and improve the quality of life. Integration of multiple data types (multimodal data) into artificial intelligence models is required for the development of accurate and personalised interventions. This is particularly true for the inclusion of genomic data, which is information-rich and individual-specific, and more routinely available as the cost of sequencing continues to fall. Multimodal data integration is complex due to privacy and governance requirements, the presence of multiple standards, distinct data formats, and underlying data complexity and volume.

NextGen aims to build novel and synergistic tools to enable portable multimodal, multiomic and clinically oriented research in high-impact areas of cardiovascular medicine. NextGen tools will benefit researchers, innovators and healthcare professionals by identifying and overcoming health data linkage barriers in exemplar cardiovascular use cases which are complex or intractable with existing technology. Consequently, it will benefit patients, providing faster diagnosis, and better treatments (including personal medicine). A comprehensive gap analysis of the existing landscape, factoring in ongoing initiatives will ensure NextGen deliverables are forward-looking and complimentary. In particular, the NextGen embedded governance framework and robust regulatory processes will ensure secure multi-jurisdictional phenotype and genomic data access aligned with initiatives including “1+ Million Genomes” and European Health Data Space. Several real-world pilots will demonstrate the effectiveness of NextGen tools and will be integrated in the NextGen Pathfinder network of five collaborating clinical sites as a self-contained data ecosystem and comprehensive proof of concept.