BioTransR 2017 Meeting summary On 15 – 16th May the BioTransR conference, organised by the IMI funded project eTRIKS, took place in Barcelona. eTRIKS provides collaborative projects with advice, service, and a data management platform. It has supported over 60 projects in the past 4 ½ years. eTRIKS members agree that we are facing a data tsunami and the complexity of medical science is increasing exponentially. We run the risk of not having enough expertise to make sense of all the data. So, now more than ever, there is an opportunity to engage translational researchers and clinicians in helping to make […]

  Better use of data is needed to get more cures for diseases   Most research today is done on data, rather than on patients. The problems that are being tackled are large and complex, as is the medical research data used to tackle these problems. This means careful analysis of the data is paramount, supported by the right tools and the right approach to the analysis. Undoubtedly, better use of data is needed to get more cures for diseases. Not only because datasets that are generated today are often very large, but also they because they involve many different […]

People who say no to their data being used to help clinical trials are potentially robbing themselves of the chance to help speed up the discovery of life-saving treatments to deadly diseases, a workshop at the European Parliament has heard. But fears over the potential misuse of data and a perceived lack of trust towards ‘faceless’ medical organisations were cited as understandable causes for concern at the eTRIKS conference in Brussels. The summit saw representatives from Government, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, researchers and patient groups come together to discuss ways of balancing patients’ concerns over the sharing of their data […]

More than a third of people do not trust the NHS with their personal information through fears it could be lost, stolen or handed to private companies, a poll has found. A total of 56 per cent of the 2,000 people surveyed in the inaugural National Personal Data in Research Survey would also stand in the way of advances in medical science by not allowing their data to be shared for research. Leading health charities have expressed their concern and disappointment over a lack of willingness for people to help support further medical breakthroughs, including cures to cancers and other […]

Further medical breakthroughs including cures to cancers and other long-term conditions could be possible if more people took part in research. That’s the claim from a European-wide campaign to increase the sharing of patient data among studies, which is calling for a new “smarter approach” to the collection of research information. It comes as new data rules from the European Parliament are set to be adopted across the continent in a bid to strengthen and unify data protection for individuals within the European Union (EU) Research standards expert Paul Houston, a spokesman for the eTRIKS project – a collaboration between […]