How iCARE4CVD is advancing personalised cardiovascular care in Europe

Cardiovascular disease remains one of Europe’s most urgent health challenges, affecting more than 85 million people. Through iCARE4CVD, a €22 million public–private collaboration led by Maastricht University and Novo Nordisk, 37 partners are working to redesign cardiovascular care – from early risk detection to treatment decisions for patients with established heart failure. The 54-month project is funded by the Innovative Health Initiative and runs until March 2028. We heard from Prof. Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca, coordinator of iCARE4CVD and Professor of Cardiology at Maastricht University and Maastricht University Medical Center+.

Professor Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca, Project Coordinator of iCARE4CVD

Rethinking cardiovascular care through personalisation

Over the past decade, the idea of truly personalised treatment in cardiovascular disease has been gaining traction. One of the most ambitious examples of this shift is iCARE4CVD, a large European consortium of 37 partners from academia, industry and civil society, working together to rethink how cardiovascular patients are treated in routine care.

The project focuses on four distinct areas of cardiovascular care: detecting risk earlier, stratifying patients by urgency, predicting treatment response to guide personalised therapy, and supporting more patient-centric care.

“In cardiovascular disease, treatment is often still one size fits all,” Hans-Peter explains. “There is a long history of risk prediction, but it has not changed much in clinical practice. iCARE4CVD aims to change that by developing tools to enable individualised treatment decisions. With today’s technology, it is possible. We can integrate many more digital signals, biomarkers, and other variables, and we’re combining classical statistics with AI-based modelling. That allows us to take this idea of personalised cardiovascular treatment much further than traditional methods alone ever could.”

Building the evidence base for heart failure treatment models

Today, the project has moved from concept development to implementation, with key infrastructure in place. An early milestone saw the consortium assemble a privacy-preserving federated database that aggregates data from over one million patients, spanning digital, blood, and imaging biomarkers, with patient involvement embedded throughout.

This federated database is already in use, supported by additional tools developed under the project such as the clinical data elements (CDE) Mapper, enabling harmonisation of variables across diverse data cohorts. “There are quite some cohorts available, with more to come,” says Hans-Peter.

On top of this foundation, the consortium is now preparing a prospective trial to collect additional heart failure data. This will support the further development of a treatment prioritisation model by the end of the project, with prospective testing expected to follow in a future project.

“The first model has been developed in heart failure,” Hans-Peter explains. “However, we need additional prospective data to strengthen the model further. We are currently working through the ethical approval process to prepare for the trial.”

From risk prediction towards treatment prioritisation

“We’re not just doing risk prediction and clustering,” Hans-Peter continues. “The aim is to develop a model that can help prioritise specific treatments for individual heart failure patients.”

By combining federated data infrastructure, prospective data collection and AI-based modelling, the project aims to identify clinically relevant patient subgroups, follow how risk changes over time, and ultimately estimate which therapies are likely to bring the greatest benefit for individual patients.

Hans-Peter highlights how this can lead to a new approach in the management of cardiovascular disease:

“In theory, guidelines are very clear on what you should be doing, but in reality less than 2% of patients actually receive full, guideline-recommended dosing. If you cannot give everything to everybody, the crucial question becomes: what is most important to give to a specific patient? Our approach is designed to provide a way to prioritise treatments when it’s not possible to prescribe all therapies at maximum dose, and that is a fundamentally different way of managing cardiovascular disease.”

Laying the groundwork for wider impact

Work is now expanding on several fronts, including development of additional risk prediction models, clustering analyses, stakeholder engagement with patients and healthcare professionals, and dedicated efforts on legal and regulatory aspects, including contributions to EU-level health policy.

As Hans-Peter frames it, the impact of iCARE4CVD does not lie in a single definitive outcome:

“I’m convinced that iCARE4CVD is really changing the way that we look at cardiovascular disease and treatment of it, but it will not be the definitive project that solves everything. I see it more as a start towards a new way to approach these patients. We’re creating a strong platform to develop and validate these models, not just within the project, but beyond it.”

Collaborating with Catalyze

When asked about his experience working with Catalyze, both during the grant preparation and now as a partner for project management and science communication, Hans-Peter highlighted the support across the full trajectory of iCARE4CVD.

“The submission process was very well supported by Catalyze. Our consultant was really brilliant. We wrote the proposal in about six weeks, so it was quite fast. Catalyze’s support allowed me to focus on the content and other aspects that are important in such a large consortium. They also played an important role during the second step of the process in preparing industrial partners.”

As an iCARE4CVD partner, Catalyze is proud to co-lead the science communication work package, together with Roche. In addition, Catalyze provides further support in management of iCARE4CVD.

“The people from Catalyze are very nice to collaborate with, they’re very supportive, very helpful, and it’s also clear that they are experienced in working on these kinds of projects. So it really helps a lot.”

Catalyze’s iCARE4CVD science communication activities are led by Carolina Vieira, and project management activities by Ketharini Senthilkumar and Coralie Zurstrassen.