International public-private research consortium iCARE4CVD (individualised care from the early risk of cardiovascular disease to established heart failure) has launched with the aim of personalising the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease (CVD).
iCARE4CVD also received a €22m ($23.3m) grant from the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), which is a joint undertaking between the European Commission (EC) and the European life science industry.
iCARE4CVD is led and coordinated by Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Novo Nordisk. The consortium features 33 partners from academia, civil society, and industry. The project is expected to run for 54 months from October 2023 to 31 March 2028.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified CVD as the leading cause of death globally. The WHO estimates that CVD is responsible for 17.9 million deaths annually. The demand for cardiovascular care is expected to increase, especially due to shortages of therapies for this indication.
“As doctors, we are mostly bound to a one-size-fits-all approach while treating our patients with CVD. Our mission however, within iCARE4CVD, is to personalise diagnosis and management of CVD to improve both outcome and patient satisfaction,” said iCARE4CVD coordinator Prof Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca in the 25 October press release.
“We will achieve this by collecting data of more than one million subjects in a federated database, analysing them using artificial intelligence (AI) and prospectively validating personalised treatments during the second half of iCARE4CVD.”
The iCARE4CVD programme will target four aspects of current CVD care with the aim of improving all these aspects, thereby, improving patient outcomes. The aspects include early diagnosis along with a classification of these patients into clinically meaningful subgroups, risk stratification to inform intervention urgency, predicting response to individual CVD treatment, and including outcomes based on patient viewpoints.
People with type 1 and type 2 diabetes who are at risk of developing CVD will also be included as part of the iCARE4CVD project.
iCARE4CVD project partner Novo Nordisk has invested in developing its cardiometabolic pipeline in recent months. In September, the Danish company partnered with the AI start-up Valo to discover and develop cardiometabolic therapies.
