Pioneering Belgian project ATHENA paves the way for Real-World Data reuse in research and personalized care

Leuven, Belgium, 21 November 2023 - ATHENA, a VLAIO-funded multistakeholder project, clears the path for increased reuse of Real-World Data in scientific research and healthcare, by introducing innovative solutions and responding to current technical and governance challenges. The project has made significant strides in the field of oncology by developing groundbreaking privacy-preserving machine learning techniques for predictive analytics. The project findings will be presented and discussed at the ATHENA symposium on November 23rd, 2023.

Belgium has potential to become leader in Real-World Data reuse: ATHENA shows us how

Hospitals and healthcare professionals accumulate vast amounts of patient data daily, comprising Real-World Data (RWD) like medical records, imaging data, and lab analyses. These data hold potentially life-saving insights if repurposed for research. “RWD serves as a valuable resource supporting research across multiple domains,” says Roel Wuyts, R&D manager at imec and professor at KU Leuven. “By using RWD to identify patterns, we can assess the long-term effectiveness and safety of treatments across a large population or formulate personalized medicine, tailoring treatments to match particular patient groups.”

Despite being an early adopter of electronic health records and historical leader in clinical trials per capita within the EU, Belgium presently lags behind its neighboring countries in effectively leveraging RWD. Urgent challenges, including data standardization, security, patient privacy, and regulatory governance, call for concrete solutions to enhance the country's data reuse capabilities. ATHENA, short for Augmenting Therapeutic Effectiveness through Novel Analytics, is now providing essential building blocks to tackle these challenges. 

Throughout the three-year project duration, ATHENA partners have been developing innovative models to unlock, align, and integrate data for two disease cases: multiple myeloma and bladder cancer. Through federated data management, patient data remains secure within the hospital environment. Instead of collecting patient data from collaborating healthcare centers and performing machine learning manipulations on the data as a whole, analyses are performed on data while at the hospital level. Wuyts adds: “We guarantee full patient privacy by conducting analyses on-site and only sharing patterns and insights.” ATHENA's federated approach provides a technical solution that effectively mitigates complex governance and legal challenges.  

A pioneering project presenting recommendations for a clear path forward

To support easy reuse of RWD, it is essential to focus on the governance aspects as well. “Next to an updated data infrastructure, a solid data governance framework needs to be decided upon and implemented,” says Ingrid Maes, Managing Director and Co-founder at Inovigate, “Today, such a framework is missing in Belgium.” ATHENA partners have elaborated a governance model to ensure that patient data can be reused in a safe and privacy-preserving way. By implementing the key building blocks and recommendations devised in the ATHENA project, the government can construct an appropriate legislative framework, allowing Belgium to reclaim its leadership in digital health and RWD. ATHENA stands out as a multi-stakeholder initiative, setting it apart from various single-stakeholder projects. Maes emphasizes, “Instead of reflecting the perspective of a single entity, ATHENA integrates insights from hospitals, patient organizations, academic institutes, life science industry, and pharmaceutical companies. The solutions proposed in the ATHENA project garner support from all these stakeholders.”