EXIT-CVD consortium launches 22 clinical studies across Europe
Royal Philips and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) have launched EXIT-CVD, a five-year pan-European research consortium backed by EUR 27.6 million in co-funding from the European Union's Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) and industry partners. The programme brings together 42 public and private organisations across 17 countries to run 22 clinical studies in more than 14,000 patients, with enrolment in the first study beginning this month.
The project is structured around three intervention points along what it calls the "cardiac care journey": early detection before disease establishes itself, reversal of mid-stage progression, and stabilisation in advanced disease. Each exit point is matched to a cluster of diagnostic, monitoring, and therapeutic tools that the consortium will validate in prospective studies.
Clinical programme
Five studies illustrate the breadth of the agenda. The CARDIO-CAM study will evaluate contactless, video-based monitoring to capture cardiorespiratory signals in hospital settings without wired sensors. The LEADER-PAD study will test whether spectral CT imaging improves early detection and risk stratification in asymptomatic patients. The REMODEL-HF study is a multinational randomised trial of a non-invasive remote monitoring system for recently hospitalised heart failure patients. The GUIDANCE-PCCT study will compare photon-counting CT-guided percutaneous coronary intervention against standard angiography guidance. The NOTIFY-2 study will validate AI-driven algorithms applied to cardiac imaging and ECG data for earlier identification of left ventricular hypertrophy.
Professor Pim van der Harst, EXIT-CVD's project coordinator and head of cardiology at UMCG, said the consortium's ambition is "a future where heart disease is no longer an irreversible pathway," combining biological and social drivers of disease in a single integrated framework.
The industrial side of the consortium is unusually broad: alongside Philips, partners include GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Medtronic, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Sanofi, and Johnson and Johnson MedTech, among others. That depth signals serious commercial interest in the data platform and real-world evidence the project will generate, not merely academic curiosity.
Market context and equity agenda
Cardiovascular disease affects more than 60 million people in the EU and remains the leading cause of premature death across member states. The European Health Data Space regulation, adopted in 2024, is creating the infrastructure for cross-border patient data flows that projects like EXIT-CVD depend on; EXIT-CVD's data platform is explicitly designed to be FAIR-compliant and aligned with that framework.
The consortium's equity-by-design commitment is notable in a sector where digital health tools have historically penetrated affluent, well-connected populations first. By embedding implementation science and explicitly targeting socioeconomic, sex-related, and digital-access gaps from the outset, EXIT-CVD is attempting to pre-empt the access inequalities that have undermined previous large-scale European cardiovascular initiatives.
The IHI public-private model, which pairs Horizon Europe funding with mandatory industry co-investment, has become a preferred mechanism for large infrastructure studies in Europe over the past three years. Outcomes from EXIT-CVD's randomised arms, particularly REMODEL-HF and GUIDANCE-PCCT, are likely to be watched closely by payers and guideline bodies as potential levers for updating standard-of-care recommendations before the project's five-year window closes in 2031.