The Dutch Cancer Society will fund the Translational Research IT (TraIT) project with EUR 2.25 million to build an integrated Dutch biomedical research infrastructure. By gathering, processing, and storing data on a large scale, opportunities arise to accelerate and improve cancer diagnostics and treatments. An efficient and integrated research infrastructure is essential for storing and processing of these large amounts of data. With the TraIT project, an important step can be taken to develop such an infrastructure.
TraIT has developed an online suite of software applications that has been open for translational researchers since 2011. It is one of the platforms of DTL partner Lygature. To date, almost 3000 users are actively working with these applications. TraIT is actively involved in the Health-RI initiative, in which multiple infrastructure programmes, including DTL and ELIXIR-NL, jointly work on an integrated national infrastructure for personalised medicine and health research.
Corine van Vliet, manager Research Funding Dutch Cancer Society: “The contribution of the Dutch Cancer Society to TraIT contributes to the establishment of Health-RI. With this initiative, biomedical research can result more efficiently and faster in better diagnostics and personalised treatment. Cancer patients will benefit from the realisation of a single national research infrastructure.”
Gerrit Meijer, Principal Investigator TraIT, Head of Pathology NKI: “With this grant, the Dutch Cancer Society has set a crucial step in professionally facilitating translational cancer research. TraIT is an essential building block for Health-RI, the national infrastructure for translational research that prepares Dutch scientific research for the future.”
Jan-Willem Boiten, Projectmanager TraIT, Lygature: “TraIT takes care of time-consuming practical issues so that researchers are able to focus and do what they do best. TraIT enables data sharing and makes it possible to further build on the data, even after the study has been finalised. Research funders will see an increase in the return of investment.”