15/09/2026

Building Bridges: How Public-Private Collaboration Can Help Reshape Cardiovascular Innovation

Personalised cardiovascular medicine promises to give the right care to the right patient at the right time. But making that a reality takes more than a scientific breakthrough. It requires clinical expertise, patient data, technology, regulatory know-how and a path into everyday healthcare – expertise that rarely exists in one place. So how do we bring all the pieces together?

Personalised cardiovascular medicine aims to make care more responsive to individual differences in risk, disease progression and treatment response.

Turning this ambition into better care requires clinical insight, data, technology, patient perspectives and implementation expertise to come together – capabilities that rarely sit within a single organisation. This is the premise behind iCARE4CVD, a €22 million public-private partnership bringing together 40 partners across academia, healthcare, industry, technology and patient organisations.

Supported by the Innovative Health Initiative, iCARE4CVD is part of a broader effort to bring public and private partners together to translate health research and innovation into tangible benefits for patients and society.

We spoke with three people helping lead iCARE4CVD from different sides of the partnership: Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca, Professor of Cardiology at Maastricht University and project coordinator; Alix Feldman, PhD, Senior Alliances Manager, Research Partnerships at NOVO and Maria Sejersten Ripa, iCARECVD Industry Lead and Medical Director, Global Medical Affairs, Cardiovascular Diseases at NOVO and a board-certified cardiologist.

No one holds all the pieces

For Maria Sejersten Ripa, the need for personalised cardiovascular medicine begins with something she has seen first-hand as a cardiologist.

“As a cardiologist, I have seen how different patients with the same CV diagnosis can be.We still need better ways to identify who is at risk, who needs earlier intervention, and who is most likely to benefit from specific treatments."

Finding those answers requires expertise that extends beyond any one discipline or sector:

“Personalised cardiovascular medicine requires access to data, clinical insight, patient perspectives, technology, regulatory understanding and implementation expertise. No single sector holds all of that.”

iCARE4CVD aims to bring those capabilities together, combining large-scale patient data, biomarkers and AI-based tools to improve diagnosis, risk stratification and prediction of treatment response. But developing a model is only part of the challenge. It also needs to be tested across populations, disease stages and healthcare systems.

For Alix Feldman, this is why collaboration needs to go beyond individual contributions:

"The current challenges in cardiovascular care can’t be solved alone, as it is fundamentally a systems challenge."

Academic and clinical partners bring scientific and clinical knowledge; industry contributes expertise in areas such as technology, evidence generation, regulatory pathways and scalability; and patient organisations bring the perspective of those innovations are ultimately intended to serve.

From his position as iCARE4CVD coordinator, Hans-Peter Brunner-La Rocca sees this combination of expertise as key to moving research closer to practice:

“Working with industry has enabled iCARE4CVD to combine academic clinical expertise and rich patient cohorts with the technological, regulatory and implementation capabilities needed to translate research into scalable healthcare solutions,”

Industry partners bring expertise in areas such as data standards, advanced analytics and regulatory strategy, helping ensure that what is developed can ultimately fit into clinical workflows.

“The collaboration therefore goes beyond producing a scientific model: it creates a realistic pathway towards a validated, implementable tool that could support more personalised treatment decisions in routine care.”

From different perspectives to shared purpose

Bringing different capabilities together also means bringing different ways of working into the same room. Partners may have different incentives, cultures, timelines and expectations, while data governance, intellectual property and decision-making become more complex. As Maria puts it:

"Alignment does not mean everyone thinks the same. It means everyone understands the shared purpose and is transparent about their constraints.”

Those differences can also strengthen the work – challenging partners to consider whether an innovation is scientifically robust, clinically meaningful, relevant to patients and other stakeholders as well as realistic to implement.

Alix describes this as moving from “collaboration through contribution to collaboration as co-creation.”

Data sharing is a good example. Even within a secure federated system, agreeing how data can be used safely across organisations takes time, governance and trust. In return, partners can generate evidence across datasets and settings that they could not produce alone.

Designing for adoption from the start

Ultimately, the value of collaboration depends on whether research can translate into better care. “A research output only matters if it can change care,” Maria says. 

For Alix, “the biggest gap is in the translation of new knowledge into the healthcare system.” Solutions therefore need to be designed “with adoption in mind, rather than leaving implementation as an afterthought.”

The question becomes not only does it work?, but can it work for patients and clinicians in everyday care?

Building bridges

“I’m motivated by building bridges between communities that don’t always work together naturally. What often looks like a clinical problem is actually a systems problem.”

Alix shares.

That captures the promise of public-private collaboration. Its value lies not simply in bringing more organisations together but in connecting different perspectives early enough to shape what is developed – and how.

For personalised cardiovascular medicine that could be the crucial bridge between discovering what is possible and making it work for patients.

iCARE4CVD is supported by the Innovative Health Initiative (iHi). We thank IHI and its contributing partners for supporting the collaboration that makes this work possible.

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Funding acknowledgment

This project is supported by the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (IHI JU) and Breakthrough T1D under grant agreement No 101112022. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and COCIR, EFPIA, Vaccines Europe, EuropaBio and MedTech Europe.

Disclaimer

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the aforementioned parties. Neither of the aforementioned parties can be held responsible for them.

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