GE HealthCare has revealed that it will take on the lead industrial role in COMPASS, a new European consortium that aims to improve cardio-oncology care paradigms.
COMPASS, which launched on 26 March, will run for a five-year period. The initiative aims to establish a “comprehensive, end-to-end, patient-centred” clinical pathway for cancer patients and survivors to facilitate more timely intervention and safer continuation of cancer therapies while reducing the risk of cardiovascular complications.
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With €50.5m ($58.3m) in funding and the involvement of more than sixty partners, COMPASS is co-funded under the European Union’s (EU) Horizon Europe framework and is part of the EU’s Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), a public-private partnership between the EU and the European life science industries.
COMPASS’s key objectives are to predict cardiotoxicity risk, detect cardiovascular disease at an earlier stage, coordinate and personalise cancer and cardiovascular care, support patients in their daily lives, and manage the long-term cardiovascular effects of cancer treatment.
To meet these aims, COMPASS’s members will focus on identifying novel biomarkers for cardiotoxicity diagnosis and risk stratification and assess how patient care delivery and patient engagement can be improved.
The consortium will also advance the application of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled predictive and clinical decision support tools and use AI to integrate real-world data, imaging, non-imaging, biomarkers and wearable data into predictive models and decision-support tools for personalised care in clinical settings.
“This initiative is well positioned to enable patient-centred cancer care that takes cardiotoxicity risk into account, supports the early detection of cardiotoxic side-effects, and promotes long-term heart health for oncology patients,” said Eigil Samset, general manager of cardiology solutions at GE HealthCare.
“By developing an AI-powered, integrated care pathway that connects oncologists and cardiologists in clinical practice, this collaboration has the potential to further improve cancer survival by tackling cardiovascular-related morbidity,” Samset continued.
Beyond GE HealthCare, other partners to COMPASS include King’s College London, which will serve as the consortium’s academic lead.
Steve Archibald, professor in molecular imaging at the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London, commented: “King’s College London is looking forward to providing academic leadership and scientific coordination to COMPASS, harnessing the consortium expertise across cardiology, oncology, molecular science, big data and AI to address the increasing challenge in cardiotoxicity in cancer care.”
Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) among cancer patients and survivors are driven both by the increasing prevalence of pre‑existing cardiovascular conditions at diagnosis and by the expanding use of effective antitumor therapies such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Research has found that this patient population is at an increased risk of CVDs including heart failure and venous thromboembolism (VTE).
