Together, BBMRI-NL, EATRIS-NL and DTL/ELIXIR-NL worked out a vision and roadmap to create an infrastructure for research into medicine and health in the coming decade. We propose to bundle a wide range of distributed resources (biobanks, facilities, data collections) in a common large-scale infrastructure: Health-RI. A linked (FAIR) data network will serve as a strong binding element and physical backbone to connect data sources in participating labs, and allow distributed analytics among them. Health-RI will greatly stimulate and facilitate collaboration and data sharing among stakeholders, including citizens and patients. The goal is to build a continuously growing reference knowledge base for individually tailored health and medicine applications. Health-RI will also drive the development of a national (e-)health system that gives citizens full control over their personal data.
For DTL, Health-RI provides an important spot on the horizon to direct its programmes in the coming years, in close collaboration with other communities. The broad DTL partnership will be essential to establish this connected infrastructure, and to effectively involve the research resources and expertise of the DTL partners, not only in the biomedical field, but also in nutrition and e-health fields. Health-RI will provide a generic model to organise and connect distributed resources in the life sciences, and one could easily envisage a similar setup tailored to other life science fields. Therefore, DTL will involve communities in agri&food, biotechnology and biodiversity to establish a connected infrastructure for their sectors as well.
For more information, please contact DTL director Ruben Kok.