Issue #18 - BBMRI.se

#18
IN THIS ISSUE
Editorial: A dynamic phase in the BBMRI.se development2
Improving conditions for registry-based reserach: Interview with Bengt Westerberg3
Progress of the National Biobank of Denmark 5
Internationally coordinated biobank registries – Making Open Access a reality6
The Swedish Research Council initiative to promote research based on registries and biobanks
7
Building a research infrastructure for critically ill patients8
The 2015 BBMRI.se National Workshop9
The Swedish Cohort Consortium (COHORTS.SE)10
Open Source IT systems for international biobanking: The B3Africa project11
Upcoming Events & News in Brief12
The BBMRI.se Staff at the 2015 National Workshop. From left to right: Erik Bongcam-Rudloff (SLU, Uppsala), Hans Friberg (Region Skåne),
Kjell Grankvist (Umeå Universiry), Mark Divers (Karolinska Institutet, KI), Roxana Merino Martinez (KI), Suyesh Amatya (KI) ,Ulla Rudsander (KI), Markus Heidenblad (Region Skåne), Johanna Ekström (Lund University, LU), Sandra Sernbo (LU), Lena Thunell (Linköping
University), Deborah Mascalzoni (Uppsala University, UU), Sofie Petersson (KI), Joakim Dillner (KI), Gunnel Tybring (KI), Eva Ortega-Paino
(LU), Lina Strömstedt (SLU, Uppsala), Ulf Landegren (UU), Nasrin Perskvist (KI), Eva Büren (KI), Lars Andersson (KI), Peter Nilsson (LU).
Attendants not present in picture: Åsa Thorinson Naluai (Gothenburg University), Bart Wilkowski (Danish National Biobank) and Karina
Meden Sørensen (Danish National Biobank).
#18 June 2015
2 biobank SWEDEN
Public Opinion and Debate
Editorial
A dynamic phase in the BBMRI.se development
Welcome to the summer issue of biobank Sweden,
the NewsLetter of BBMRI.se. Particularly during
the last six months, there has been a dynamic development ongoing in BBMRI.se all over Sweden.
This is increasingly difficult to cover thoroughly
in the NewsLetter, in spite of the fact that we are
now issuing the NewsLetter more often and that
each issue is crammed with important news. We
hope that everyone who is interested in improvements of the infrastructure for medical research
will find the content interesting.
At the same time, the new and dynamic phase is
making us reflect on our previous mistakes and
what we can learn from them. During 2014, our
prime priority was to enlarge BBMRI.se by working towards establishing formal collaborative
agreements with others. This work was unsuccessful and resulted in that the basic foundations for working in BBMRI.se became less clear.
Where were the borders of our organization?
What were our common values? An important
lesson learned is that collaborations need to be
based on a common ground of shared values and
that we must not forget that a prime priority
for us is to provide the co-workers with optimal
working conditions, including clear organization
and tasks as well as a supportive environment
characterized by respect and courtesy to each
other. I have said it many times and would like to
state it again: our most important resource is not
the samples, the data or the softwares – it is our
co-workers.
The 2015 workshop for the co-workers of
BBMRI.se revealed an amazing progress and was
also characterized by a productive, respectful and
joyful dialogue. I was also pleased to see that we
are developing into an increasingly multi-ethnic
organization, with no less than eight different
nationalities represented. We had workshop
discussions that will help us to face the important challenges of the future. Measures on how
to promote Open Access will include better and
more consolidated biobank registries and other
OpenSource software tools for biobank-based
research, support to more widely recognized
systems for providing credit to the originator
of the shared resources (notably the Biospecimen Resource Impact Factor, BRIF) and readily accessible, internationally valid education on
the why and how of the re-use of resources. We
will be prioritizing work on how to improve the
BBMRI.se Services. Common templates of offered
services will enable all employees to specify exactly which BBMRI.se services they are working
with. Work on innovation and sustainability will
be elaborated. The international development
will be supported for example by increasingly
making tools and resources openly available for
the international research community, by increased collaboration with other international
research infrastructures that also have nodes in
Sweden and by development of education in collaboration with major international organizations such as BBMRI-ERIC and WHO/IARC.
I think that we can now look forward to a very
positive development and would like to wish all
the readers of biobank Sweden a nice summer!
Joakim Dillner
Director BBRMI.se
biobank SWEDEN 3
Improving conditions for register-based research:
Interview with Bengt Westerberg
Last summer Bengt Westerberg, former Minister of Social Affairs (1991-1994) and qualified chairman with several past and ongoing
high profile missions, filed the governmentinitiated report on register-based research.
In the conference “Agenda for Health and Welfare” organized by Research Sweden, Bengt
Westerberg presented the results of the report, and biobank SWEDEN followed-up with
some additional questions on his work.
Bengt Westerberg, did the degree from Karolinska
Institutet in your early years influence your long
and successful working life and career choices?
uncertainties that were revealed by the research
project LifeGene, which was closed by the Data
Inspection Board in December 2011. By a temporary law LifeGene was reinitiated in 2013.
However, the government wanted to find a permanent law that would support Swedish registerbased and biobank-based research. Essentially,
biobanks can be regarded as biological data registers.
As chairman of the Swedish Research Council
I had been involved in investments in registerbased infrastructure, for example the project
SIMSAM which is still ongoing. After that I made
an investigation 2011-2012 about the statistics
system in Sweden, where I also looked at registers as an important source for research.
I studied a few years at Karolinska Institutet as
a young undergraduate student and received a
bachelor´s degree in medical sciences. After that I
studied economy and political science. I think that
The investigations on the statistical system and
all acquired knowledge
register-based research
is joyful and useful for
were both commisthe rest of your life but
sioned by the Swedish
it´s somewhat hard to
government. As investipinpoint exactly when
gator you get directives,
in your life it´s being
including what issues
used. However, there
to be addressed and
is one definite examsolved. During the work
ple of how my medical
it is not unusual to find
education was useful,
problems that were not
and it is when I was the
addressed in the dichairman of the Swedrectives. In my report
ish Research Council in
on register-based rethe beginning of 2000s
search (SOU 2014:45)
and we were about to
one of those issues is
establish a policy for Bengt Westerberg
international sharing of
Foto: Anne Thelander, Neuroförbundet Media
stem cell research. I
personal data for medihad knowledge about
cal research purposes,
cells and cell differentiation and it made my unwhere further investigations have to be made.
derstanding of the policy work a lot easier.
What are the main results of the report?
How did you get the job as investigator of improved
conditions for register-based research and writer
The main result is that we need a law to support
of the report (SOU 2014:45)?
creation of research databases that can be used
in different future research projects that are
The trigger factor of the investigation was the
not known today. Uncertainty about the future
4 biobank SWEDEN
research questions is part of the very nature of
research. Infrastructure databases of this kind
might be built by data collected by researchers,
by data from registers created for other purposes
(statistical, administrative etc) or a combination
of these.
Although the legal base for infrastructure databases currently is not complete we still have
some useful databases in Sweden. At least half of
them are for social science research, for example
the UGU-register at Gothenburg University which
monitors the Swedish school system. Another
valuable database is the Twin Register at Karolinska Institutet, used in both medical science and
social science. Both these databases have been in
operation for more than 50 years, but they, and
others, could disappear if a new law is not passed.
Another important conclusion from the report is
that we need a National Biobank Register in Sweden, where all stored biobank samples would be
searchable. It had previously been proposed that
a county council could hold such a register, but I
find it natural that the National Board of Health
and Welfare would be holder of the National
Biobank Register, since it already has extensive
experience on maintaining national health data
registers.
Opposition to these suggestions is mostly about
integrity risks. Of course, we must make sure that
rigorous security measures are taken. But it´s also
important to mention that leakages of sensitive
data have so far never occurred from research
environments, supporting the claim that there
exists experience on the safe handling of data.
Researchers are not interested in individuals,
but in patterns in the population. Small personal
integrity risks have to be weighed against large
research gains, and in this balance there is much
to support the creation of research databases as
well as a comprehensive national biobank register.
What are your future plans?
I’m the chairman of the board of five different organisations from different parts of society, from
social sciences to medical sciences, patient insurance, culture and arts. Actually, I´m about to
downsize my missions. I would like to have more
time for reading, decreasing the pile of unread
books at home, and maybe also get the time for
writing.
International Benchmarking
biobank SWEDEN 5
Progress of the National Biobank of Denmark
The National Biobank of Denmark was started as late as 2012, but has already achieved a
lot. At the BBMRI.se 2015 National Workshop
in Skåne, head of operations Karina Meden
Sørensen presented the progress and the services offered by the National Biobank of Denmark. biobank SWEDEN posed her some additional questions.
Statens Serum Institut (SSI) in Copenhagen is a
national public health institute that was established more than a hundred years ago, with the
main tasks to achieve disease control for infectious diseases and congenital disorders. Today, it
is one of the largest medical research institutions
in Denmark. SSI is also developing and producing vaccines and offering contract manufacturing
and contract research organizational services.
The Danish National Biobank was constructed
in 2011-2012 with SSI as the host institute. SSI
needed overview and structure for the hundreds
of freezers with legacy collections that needed to
be matched with data and ordered.
- The largest sample collections stored at the
Danish National Biobank
are 4-6 million residual
samples from diagnostic
departments and 2 million
phenylketonuria
(PKU)
screening samples that
encompass all newborns
born in Denmark since
1975, Karina Meden
Karina Meden Sørensen Sørensen explains.
There is also biobanking of blood samples from
the Danish National Birth Cohort, a large epidemiological cohort. Large numbers of diagnostic
residual samples are also received and stored
from regional healthcare hospitals and from private institutions like the Danish Cancer Society.
- The Danish National Biobank has 2 parts: The
physical biobank facility located at SSI and, the
Danish Biobank Register, Karina explains further. The Danish Biobank Register contains many
more sample collections than those stored at the
national biobank facility. When other collaborating facilities deposit the data on the collections
they store into the register, these collections are
also considered to be part of the Danish National
Biobank.
Examples of collections that are stored elsewhere
but are registered in the Danish Biobank Register
are for example the samples from national networks of cancer biobanks and other pathology
biobanks. The physical facility collects samples
nationally for population-based cohorts, samples
for these cohorts may have first been received at
regional hospitals before being deposited at the
Danish National Biobank, where sample handling is automated and traceable by 2D barcodes.
Storage is water-cooled and primarily located in
the ground floor of the biobank building, in both
manual and automated storage units, but also in
the basement in a large walk-in freezer. The customers of the Danish National Biobank are also
offered a wide array of analysis services. These
are offered in the same building as the biobank,
where the biobank laboratory is offering e.g. DNA
extraction, biomarker analysis, SNP analyses, and
DNA sequencing services.
- The launch of the Danish National Biobank
has been a very intense process, Karina Meden
Sørensen says. Now that the biobank is fully operational, we are ready to engage in nationwide
networking activites like you have in Sweden and
Norway.
6 biobank SWEDEN
biobank SWEDEN 7
International Networking
National Networking & Stakeholder Dialogue
Internationally coordinated biobank registries –
Making Open Access a reality
The Swedish Research Council initiative
to promote research based on registries and biobanks
For more than a decade, it has been widely appreciated that an improvement of the infrastructure for
medical research by effective re-use of already available resources requires an efficient display of which
materials exist – so-called Biobank Registries. There are a number of prominent international registries
that today work together towards building a consolidated research infrastructure to support Open Access. Of course, these registries are built using software developed under the Open Source principle. In
order to promote development and consolidation, BBMRI.se is actively working together with several of
these initiatives. Here is a brief introduction to some of them:
>>>The P3G Observatory
(www.p3gobservatory.org) contains data from
164 biobanks all over the world, with an estimated 12 million participants. P3G (Public Population Project in Genomics and Society) is a nonprofit consortium that was started in 2003 and
provides the international research community
with access to the expertise, resources and innovative tools for health and social sciences research (www.p3g.org). P3G researchers have
been leading in the development and spreading of Open Source software for biobanking and
biobank-based research (see e.g. www.maelstrom-research.org).
>>>The BBMRI-ERIC Directory
(www.bbmriportal.eu) is the biobank registry
of the BBMRI-ERIC, a pan-European and internationally broadly accessible research infrastructure and a network of existing and de novo
biobanks and biomolecular resources. The infrastructure will include samples from patients and
healthy persons, representing different European
populations (with links to epidemiological and
health care information), molecular genomic resources and biocomputational tools to optimally
exploit this resource for global biomedical research. There are 345 biobanks registered, many
with several different sample collections. The
registry is searchable by e.g. diagnosis, type of
biomaterial, organ and free text.
>>>The BBMRI.se biobank registry
(www.bbmriregister.se) is the biobank registry of
BBMRI.se. We were founded in 2009 as the Swedish
node of BBMRI-ERIC and the launch of a biobank
registry was one of our first endeavours. Today, the
BBMRI.se biobank registry contains data on >14
million donors and is searchable on e.g. diagnosis,
type of biomaterial, sex and storage temperature.
>>>The WHO/IARC Biobank and Cohort building network
(www.bcnet.iarc.fr) was set up as an opportunity
for Low and Middle Income Countries to work together in a coordinated and effective manner and
jointly address the many challenges in biobanking infrastructure. The BBMRI.se programmers
are (under a contract with the WHO) developing
an Open Source software for a biobank register
that should be easy to use in any country in the
world.
>>>The Danish Biobank Registry
(www.biobanks.dk) is part of the National
Biobank of Denmark. The registry contains both
all samples stored in the national biobank facility and the samples in the pathology laboratories, the Copenhagen Hospital, the Danish Cancer
Society and the Faeroe Islands. The registry is
searchable for type of sample and diagnosis (in
ICD codes). The Open Source software behind
this registry is being transferred to Norway in a
project sponsored by the Nordic Center of Excellence in eScience NIASC (www.nordicehealth.se).
BBMRI.se has also tested the transferability of the
software by installing it at BBMRI.se.
In the 2012 research and innovation bill of
the Swedish government, there were investments made for easier access and improved
conditions for register-based research. The
Swedish Research Council (VR) project “Infrastructures for register-based research” was
launched as a direct result of the governmental appropriation autumn 2013. Half-time into
the project period (2013-2016), the VR project
team is developing a web application that will
allow researchers to perform easy searches for
metadata on the content of registers. VR and
BBMRI.se have agreed to work together to promote the possibility for similar easy searches
for metadata on the content of biobanks.
The VR project team currently consists of some
ten people, covering legal aspects, technical issues and project management. The project
leader, Maria Nilsson, has previously worked
with similar issues at NordForsk, an organization under the Nordic Council of Ministers that aims to promote Nordic cooperation
within research and research infrastructures.
To ensure good collaboration and that principally important decisions are established with
concerned authorities and organisations, VR
initiated the Register Data Board in 2014. The
Board has representatives of major data owners
such as Statistics Sweden, the National Board of
Health and Welfare, and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, but also of
major stakeholders such as the Swedish National Data Service, BBMRI.se and the universities.
- The Register Data Board has been appointed
to give advice to the VR project in particular and
commissioned to promote the use of authority register data in research, Maria Nilsson says.
The website registerforskning.se, originally
developed within SIMSAM-INFRA, will be fur-
ther developed within the VR project. In addition to providing advice and information about
Swedish registers and how to order data for
research, it will contain a web application that
will make it possible to get more detailed information on metadata in Swedish registers including which metadata that are combinable.
- A first version of the new site will be presented
by the end of 2015, says Fredrik Quistgaard. He
is technical project leader, with previous experience from building successful data warehouse
services, in both the medical and financial areas.
VR is currently interviewing researchers to
define the user requirements of the website registerforskning.se including the metadata application. A quality indicator for success will be if the website manages to decrease
the “time to data” (time from project initiation to data delivery) for the researchers.
The next step in the project is to import metadata from a few registers from different data
owners. The biobank register of BBMRI.se
will be among the first registers to be added.
In the case of the BBMRI.se register (www.bbmriregister.se), the internationally recognized standard MIABIS will be used for metadata exchange and
presentation of available biobank material. MIABIS
stands for Minimum Information About BIobank
data Sharing and is a data exchange standard that
was originally developed by BBMRI.se (1) and
has been adapted for use by cancer registries (2).
1. A Minimum Data Set for Sharing Biobank Samples, Information, and Data: MIABIS. Norlin L, Fransson MN, Eriksson M, Merino-Martinez R, Anderberg M, Kurtovic S, Litton JE. Biopreserv
Biobank. 2012 Aug;10(4):343-8.
2. A basis for translational cancer research on aetiology, pathogenesis and prognosis: Guideline for standardised and population-based
linkages of biobanks to cancer registries. Dillner J. Eur J Cancer.
2015 Jun;51(9):1018-27.
8 biobank SWEDEN
biobank SWEDEN 9
National Networking
National & International Networking
Building a research infrastructure
for critically ill patients
The 2015 BBMRI.se National Workshop
SWECRIT is a project that aims to systematically save biospecimens from critically ill patients. In the pilot phase, all patients admitted
to intensive care in Southern Sweden (Region Skåne) will be included. The ethical approval specifies consent by an “opt-out” system. Biobank SWEDEN talked to the PI (Hans
Friberg of Region Skåne) about the project
and the expected opportunities for better research and health care.
What´s your background?
I did my PhD-work
in the Laboratory for
Experimental Brain
Research in Lund. I’m
doctor in Anaestesiology and I am presently a consultant in intensive care medicine
at Region Skåne. Some 15 years ago, I started to
study cooling of the brain to protect against brain
damage after cardiac arrest. I am also involved in
INTCAR, an international cardiac arrest registry,
a global joint venture of hospitals and researchers dedicated to improving the care of cardiac arrest survivors.
How are you organising the SWECRIT pilot project?
We will include all patients admitted to an intensive care unit in Region Skåne (the hospitals in
Lund, Malmö, Helsingborg and Kristianstad). Patients may be admitted at any time seven days a
week and the median length of stay is 26 hours.
The most common diagnoses are cardiac arrest,
severe sepsis, septic chock, postoperative extensive surgery; abdominal or aortic surgery, multiple organ failure, and severe pneumonia.
On arrival in the intensive care unit, blood samples are always drawn from all patients. In the
SWECRIT study, we will additionally collect and
store whole blood, serum and plasma. The samples will be linked to the Swedish Intensive care
Register (SIR).
We perform systematic biobanking and operate under Open Access (Researchers can apply
for samples and data for medical research) and
are glad to be part of
the national research
infrastructure
for
biobank-based
research. We have received very helpful
support from BBMRI.
se on, for example,
ELSI (ethical, legal and societal issues).
What´s the outcome so far for improved treatment
of critically ill patients, and what do you expect for
the future?
In a previous project that is the forerunner to
SWECRIT, we made multiple discoveries about
new diagnostic biomarkers for severity of disease, shock and brain injury.
With SWECRIT, we will develop an infrastructure to identify causes behind severe courses of
common illnesses. If we can identify such causes,
this can help us optimize and individualize treatments and save lives.
The 2015 BBMRI.se national workshop took
place in beautiful Örenäs, Skåne, 2-3 of June
and gathered 27 participants. During two
days the BBMRI.se staff, together with invited
speakers from key collaborators (the Danish
National Biobank and the regional healthcare
provider (Region Skåne)), had an intense and
inspiring workshop.
During the first day of the workshop we had an
ambitious and informative program with presentations from all BBMRI.se Service Centers nationwide, for example the Service Centers in Umeå,
Uppsala, Stockholm, Linköping, Malmö and Lund.
In addition to the updates from our own Service
Centers we listened to presentations from Karina
Meden Sørensen, Head of operations at the Danish National Biobank - a building equipped with
the most advanced robot technology on the market, for storage, easy retrieval and optimum utilisation of biological samples. Markus Heidenblad,
of the Region Skåne Biobank Facility described
that they had had a similar journey as the Danish
National Biobank has had. One of the last presentations that day described SWECRIT, the project aiming to create systematic biobanking from
all patients attending intensive care in Sweden,
presented by the SWECRIT founder Hans Friberg
from Region Skåne.
The positive spirit from the first day continued
through the second day, when we held structured
group discussions on how to optimize the Services of BBMRI.se. We discussed issues about how
best to promote Open Access, how to better define
and clarify our services and how to best promote
the optimal development of the infrastructure for
medical research on the international level.
We also listened to a presentation from Bartlomiej Wilkowski, Head of the Danish Biobank
Register (www.biobanks.dk , a part of the Danish
National Biobank). He described how the register
displays the available samples and the accessory
medical data that is available to any researcher
interested in using the materials.
We would like to thank our invited guests Bart
Wilkowski, Karina Meden Sørensen, Markus
Heidenblad and Hans Friberg. We would also
in particular like to send a special thanks to
Eva Ortega-Paino from the BBMRI.se Service Center for Southern Sweden, who organized and hosted this fantastic workshop.
The program and the presentations will be posted at bbmri.se/en under News.
10 biobank SWEDEN
biobank SWEDEN 11
National Networking
International Networking
The Swedish Cohort Consortium (COHORTS.SE)
Open Source IT systems for international
biobanking: The B3Africa project
Large cohort consortia are an international trend in epidemiology. Biobank SWEDEN
talked to the PI of the Swedish Cohort Consortium, Johan Sundström, about the activities so
far and how it relates to BBMRI.se.
Integration of data from multiple comparable
cohorts will improve the statistical power of research. Many Swedish cohorts already take part
in both international and national consortia,
- However, the aim of COHORTS.SE, Johan Sundström says, is rather
to enable speeding up
comparability by providing tools and platforms for this.
Johan Sundström is
Professor of Epidemiology at Uppsala University, Scientific Director at Uppsala Clinical
Research Center (UCR)
and clinician at the Cardiology Unit of Uppsala
Johan Sundström
University Hospital in
Photo: Bildmakarna
Uppsala.
He has a broad background as researcher in most
aspects of heart diseases and also in other epidemiological fields.
- I think it is an advantage to have a broad research
background in my role as scientific director of
UCR, he says. Also, this is essential for the building of research infrastructures like COHORTS.SE.
-Sweden has unique opportunities for medical research, he continues. Follow-up with structured
registers is integrated into the routine patient
care. In addition, we can study unexpected endpoints, thanks to the registers. We should avoid
studies with samples too small to provide reliable
answers. The researcher should think: “Are there
other cohorts like mine, and can we collaborate?”
How will COHORTS.SE facilitate integration of
data?
- We want to build the infrastructure “bottom-up”
from the needs of the cohorts on how to best utilize the materials and the time of the donors.
Right now Johan and his team are creating contact
areas for cohorts and are gathering information
for decision-making about tools and platforms.
“The researcher should think:
Are there other cohorts
like mine,
and can we collaborate?”
- We have recently visited the McGill University
in Canada to look at the Maelstrom platform of
Open Source softwares and it looks very promising. For example, if 2 cohorts asked questions
about alcohol intake in different ways, the Maelstrom software is capable of harmonizing the
data really well.
Collaboration with BBMRI.se on access to
biobanked material will be quite natural. The pilot project for COHORTS.SE, called MetaHealth,
was run under BBMRI.se auspices and has so far
interlinked five smaller cohorts and has started
up mapping about methods, access and security
issues.
- Today, in some cases, management of a cohort
may be dependent on just one person, and we
want to document and secure the know-how for
the future, in order to secure these unique values
for research, Johan Sundström concludes.
The B3Africa project is a Horizon2020 project
starting first of July 2015 that will integrate
knowledge and technical solutions from all major biobanks infrastructure-projects in Africa and
Europe. The solutions that will be created by the
project will serve as bridge connecting data and
methods between the existing infrastructures in
accordance with the recommendations set forth
at the CAAST-net - PAERIP stakeholder conference (CAAST-Net - PAERIP stakeholder conference 2012).
Biobanks are one of the
infrastructures
prioritised for EU-African collaboration. In Europe and
Africa BBMRI-ERIC, BCNet and H3Africa projects
are the largest projects integrating and harmonizing biobanks. Participants
in the B3Africa project
Erik Bongcam-Rudloff
were selected for their
contributions to those projects and/or their potential to become lead users of the intellectual
and technical system developed by the B3Africa
project. The B3Africa consortium consists of 11
partners from 7 countries (three European and
four African).
The B3Africa project will have two main parts:
the collaboration framework and a technical
platform. The collaboration framework will include harmonization of ethics and regulations
for biobank data sharing, standardization of data
representation and bioinformatics and also will
design an online modular training system. The
technical platform will integrate available open-
source software, services and tools for biobanking, bioinformatics, ethics and regulations and
training.
The technical platform is based on the eBioKit
(http://www.ebiokit.eu) platform developed by
SLU in collaboration with the H3bionet (http://
h3bionet.org) project and the Biotechnology
platform for East and Central Africa (BECA).
This stand-alone bioinformatics platform is already in use in Africa, Asia and Europe and provide researchers with a standardized platform to
conduct bioinformatics teaching and research in
areas with limited or unreliable Internet access.
The B3Africa platform will also integrate the BiBBox open Laboratory Information Management
System (BiBBox open LIMS: http://bibbox.org )
developed at Medical University of Graz as well
as the BIKA LIMS implemented by University of
Western Cape . A monitoring system for data collection in the field based on mobile phone technology developed at the International Livestock
Research Institute (ILRI) will be integrated as
well. This project will also examine the possibilities of reusing results from ongoing projects and
establishes infrastructures as BiobankCloud,
BioMedBridges, RD-Connect, EGI, EUDAT and
ELIXIR among others.
Apart from harmonizing methods and supporting the exchange of data, the common ground for
ethics, legal and regulatory framework will be
developed in Workpackage 1 where domain experts from the BBMRI-ERIC, BCNet and H3Africa
projects convene to create joint policies based on
their extensive experience of working with international collaboration in biobanking.
>>Visit www.b3africa.org
12 biobank SWEDEN
Upcoming events
29-31 July HandsOnBiobanks (HOBB 2015) in Milan, Italy: The EXPOnential relevance of biobanking, clinical biobanks for personalized medicine. Read more http://
handsonbiobanks.org
30 Oct
2-6 Nov 18-22 Nov National Hearing on Advanced Laboratory Medicine, Huddinge Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden. Further info on bbmri.se/en under Events.
2-6 Nov 2015 BBMRI.se course in Lund: “Biobanks and Big Data: Possibilities and Challenges” Download the flyer here: http://bbmri.se/Global/
Startsida/Flyer.jpg
AORTIC 2015: African Organisation for Research and Training on Cancer
Conference in Marrakesh, Morocco: Roadmap to Cancer Control in Africa Read more http://aorticconference.org/
News In Brief
New applications to the Swedish Research Council
BBMRI.se recently filed an application to the Swedish Research Council regarding continuation of
BBMRI.se up to the year 2024. There was also an application regarding participation in BBMRI-ERIC.
On May 5th, the president of the Karolinska Institutet filed an application to the Swedish Research Council
for continued funding of BBMRI.se up to the year 2024. BBMRI.se wishes to continue to provide services to
support medical research, but with extended services and improved technology. All 8 previously participating universities continue to be partners in BBMRI.se. In addition, one additional university and 3 healthcare
providers are joining the broad support for BBMRI.se.
The European Biobank infrastructure, BBMRI-ERIC, is with its 16 EU Member
States one of the largest medical research infrastructures in EU. BBMRI-ERIC operates an infrastructure that will increase the efficacy and excellence of EU biomedical research by facilitating access to quality-defined human health/disease-relevant
biospecimens and data in an efficient and ethically and legally compliant manner.
The main purpose of our application on BBMRI-ERIC participation is to cover the
membership fee for continued participation in BBMRI-ERIC. In addition, we wish
to support BBMRI-ERIC by participating in offering EU-wide Common Services
on biobanking. In the subject area of Ethical, Legal and Societal Issues (ELSI) on
biobanking, Sweden is already one of the four EU countries that provide BBMRIERIC Common Services on ELSI.
biobank SWEDEN is the
newsletter of the BioBanking and Molecular Resource Infrastructure of
Sweden (BBMRI.se).
BBMRI.se is part of the European biobanking infrastructure BBMRI ERIC and
is funded by the Swedish
Research Council and by
partner universities.
To stay informed subscribe
to [email protected]. Also visit
www.bbmri.se to find the
newsletter as a pdf.
Publisher: Joakim Dillner