Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) consists of the uncontrolled proliferation of a clone of lymphoblasts (immature lymphoid cells), which invades the bone marrow and infiltrates multiple organs and tissues of the body. This proliferation leads to a deficit in the production of healthy hematopoietic cells (which causes anemia, infections, and hemorrhages) and the alteration of the functioning of the infiltrated organs, mainly the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes.

According to some population records, the estimated incidence of LAL in Spain is 1.6 cases per 100,000 inhabitants/year, with apparent differences between children: 3.3 cases per 100,000 inhabitants/year, and adults: 0.7 cases per 100,000 inhabitants/year.

The fact that the incidence in adults is so low makes it difficult for researchers to study this disease in individual research centers and hospitals, to obtain enough data to investigate and draw definitive conclusions transferable to medical decisions on treatment, diagnosis, and prognosis.

The HARMONY project undertakes a study on this disease, to obtain data from groups of patients with ALL and treat them. This project is led by José María Ribera, principal investigator of the Institute Josep Carreras LAL research group, and coordinator of LAL of the Spanish Programme for Hematology Treatments (PETHEMA).

HARMONY, Healthcare Alliance for Resourceful Medicine Offensive against Neoplasms in Hematology, collects data anonymously on a Big Data platform to use it for studies and research on hematological malignancies. The processing of this data can shed light on coincidences and incidences of specific patterns that give us more information on how blood diseases work. This data can be about the genome, markers, patients' ages, other conditions, or symptoms, among others, while maintaining the anonymity of the patients.

The objective of the study is to know if the deletion of the Ikaros gene, on which previous studies show alterations evidence in patients with LAL, has prognostic significance. For Ribera, "HARMONY is an exciting initiative for certain low prevalence diseases, such as LAL, because it collects a large series of patients and analyzes them using Big Data techniques. It will be possible to answer questions that we have not been able to answer due to the lack of a sufficient number of patients, even for groups of national scope".