Our approach

Data science, including the development and adoption of artificial intelligence -based methods is expected to have a transformative impact on our ability to understand disease development and trajectories. It is also expected to bring about new methods for personalized medicine in which the treatment options for patients are tailored toward the specific genetic and other characteristics of the individual. Nonetheless, there remains several and significant challenges related to the advance of data science into everyday clinical practice.

The emergence of genomic sequencing and other molecular profiling methods together with the digitalization of health care data collections have created unprecedented opportunities for better treatment options. INTERVENE is an international and interdisciplinary consortium that seeks to leverage these vast, but underused data resources to generate clinically actionable knowledge for improved understanding of diseases and treatment options tailored to individuals. Specifically, INTERVENE seeks to advance AI-facilitated analyses of complex medical data to develop genetic risk scores, which summarize the estimated effect of an individual’s genetic makeup on the risk of developing a particular disease. A central aim is to meet the urgent need for clinically validated risk scores with predictive value for complex and rare diseases, applicability for disease screening, and understandable by clinicians and citizens.

The overall objectives of INTERVENE are:

To harmonize data on more than 1.7 million genotyped / sequenced genomes with longitudinal clinical data and facilitating access to summary statistics for comparative and meta-analysis.
To develop AI-based integrative risk scores for the next generation of predictive and personalised medicine with continuous improvement and disease coverage of these scores.
To test the utility of the novel risk scores in clinical settings and develop a strategy for their implementation in Europe and beyond.

As part of INTERVENE, some of the largest biobanks in Europe and two in the USA will be securely linked and harmonized in a GDPR-compliant repository with data from more than 1.7 million genomes. INTERVENE will demonstrate the potential and benefits of powerful AI technologies on the next generation of integrative genetic scores (IGS). The clinical and economic benefits of IGS will be evaluated in key disease areas with major public health burden. The newly developed IGS will be taken into clinical environment and their real-world benefits will be evaluated together with clinical experts, European patients advocate groups and medical societies and considering regulatory and ethical implications. Thus, a framework for legally and ethically responsible translation into wider clinical practice will be developed.

INTERVENE will also develop and test the role of IGS in several rare diseases as well as COVID-19 infection and severity. Importantly, to support the application of IGS via public-private partnerships including clinical practitioners, an AI-enabled federated data analysis platform, the ‘IGS4EU’ platform, will be developed for automated IGS generation and interpretation for end-users. Additionally, the IGS4EU platform will allow access of the INTERVENE data and the methodology knowhow to the AI community through a competition-based benchmarking environment. In the long term, the IGS4EU platform aims to grow the disease coverage and enable a wide adoption of IGS as a gold standard in clinical research and practice.

Our approach

The overall objectives of INTERVENE are:

To harmonize data on more than 1.7 million genotyped / sequenced genomes with longitudinal clinical data and facilitating access to summary statistics for comparative and meta-analysis.

To develop AI-based integrative risk scores for the next generation of predictive and personalised medicine with continuous improvement and disease coverage of these scores.

To test the utility of the novel risk scores in clinical settings and develop a strategy for their implementation in Europe and beyond.

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Read more about our work packages here.