Translational Research IT Infrastructure

At a national level TraIT has been able to combine the strengths of most relevant partners in the biomedical IT field, where the responsibilities for the specific sub-domains have been assigned to those centres that have a proven track record. Because of this joint effort TraIT has a unique offering in The Netherlands.
Internationally we are not aware of an initiative at the same scale across disease areas. Some oncology centres in the US have set up similar infrastructures for internal use, while some Nordic countries work along similar lines in various stages of maturity.

1. In the clinical domain the TraIT OpenClinica service is rapidly growing with new studies being on-boarded every month. It currently contains approximately 250 studies originating from nearly 300 institutions used by more than 2000 researchers. Standard procedures are available to guide new projects through the start-up process as smoothly as possible. Upload procedures for data from external sources have been developed and applied successfully to clinical studies up to 178,000 records (the European PrehDict study).
2. TraIT has set up a biomedical image archive (BMIA: www.bmia.nl) to support current and future clinical research and trials. A secure, central platform is created to securely exchange medical image data from clinical institutions. Privacy is warranted using de-identification procedures that preserve data integrity such that further image analysis remains possible. Currently, over 80 live collections are hosted containing more than 3Tb of image data such as regular CT and MRI scans up to 4D CT/PET scans with delineations.
3. The data integration capabilities of the TraIT tranSMART service have been demonstrated in the CTMM DeCoDe project focusing on colon cancer, and is currently used actively in 10-20 other translational studies within various disease areas. tranSMART allows to integrate patient cohorts with molecular data allowing researchers to analyze and visualize their data on-the-fly identifying the value of proposed genetic biomarkers (e.g. survival analyses).

Data integration across domains is the essence of TraIT; see generic description above as well as the TraIT website.

TraIT was originally as a public-private consortium initiated by CTMM (Center for Translational Molecular Medicine). Eventually 32 partners participated in this consortium, and the current offering as a DTL hotel is a joint service between the service providers from this original TraIT consortium; Since 2015 TraIT is also part of BBMRI-NL, and it is also actively contributing to Health-RI, the national research infrastructure for personalised medicine & health research. TraIT is an active member of the international tranSMART community.  In this community there is a close alliance with the IMI eTRIKS project in order to align the international development agenda for tranSMART. Within DTL, TraIT is an active member of the health community (“red DTL sector”).