The IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative) drive large public private partnerships (PPPs) to work collaboratively towards the development of new and effective medicines. IMI PPPs such as U-BIOPRED, ABIRISK and OncoTrack produce vast amounts of data that with the right management will enable development of new therapeutic approaches for diseases such as cancer and asthma. However to do this, PPP data has to be shared. Intellectual Property matters Data in its various forms need to be formatted, shipped and stored to enable analysts to get the best they can out of it. This requires specialist help that compel owners to share […]

Learn to protect your data. Health data owners assure patients through contractual agreements that the data drawn from samples that patients provide will be protected and unavailable only to a few specialised experts. Having spent millions on accumulating that data, it would be professionally negligent as well as ethically unacceptable if data owners process patient information insecurely. EU law reflects this view by applying harsh penalties to those that don’t respect health data protection rules. High fines coupled with the prospect of very damaging media attention could irreversibly affect public confidence in companies who promise to protect patient information, but […]

Medical research remains largely focused on disease striation, but its quickly moving towards personalisation. Consequently, medical research data is being produced at a mind-boggling rate. Innovation in sample analysis has seen a surge in recent years; so much so affiliated domains are struggling to keep up. Biomedical analysis techniques that measure thousands of parameters simultaneously, places a huge burden on those that manage the data. It is generally accepted now that data collection will become even more extreme with the advent of validated personal health monitoring applications. Instead of hundreds or thousands of clinical study participants, we will see millions of […]

You know that you are on a threshold of something special when you see experts feverously working away on something they want to test live. Data integration sounds like a relatively dull activity, but nothing could be further from the truth. Is there anything more exhilarating than discovering something that has not been seen before? Of course discovering something new that is impactful is easier said than done, but Keith Elliston, CEO of the tranSMART Foundation, has turned this into his bread and butter. Keith wants to do more than make new discoveries; he wants to change the very philosophy […]

eTRIKS’ second community meeting took place in Amsterdam at the World Trade Centre on the 22nd of October. The theme of the meeting was “eTRIKS in Action” with a presentation by a key eTRIKS supported project, ABIRISK, and the launch of the eTRIKS Labs initiative.   Progress on maximizing the impact of translational research datasets Scott Wagers CEO of BioSci Consulting. eTRIKS strives to maximize the impact of translational research datasets by providing platforms, services, guidance and trainings that enable efficient integration, staging, exploration, preservation and reuse of translational research data. In our first year we supported 5 projects. Now after […]