Team: Wilma van der Berg, Maarten Bijlsma, Jeroen Belien, Charlotte Teunissen, Wiesje van der Flier, Casper de Boer en Eric Reits

Years of highly effective patient inclusions in biobanks for both cancer and neuroscience has yielded a wealth of biomaterials. Several high-profile research lines at the Amsterdam UMC have profited from these biobanks, aiding for instance innovative biomarker development, patient selection or the generation of patient-tailored disease models. However, it is also true that these large collections are incompletely annotated, with large gaps in clinical variables and sample metadata.

Likewise, informed consent procedures, data dictionaries and infrastructures differ between biobanks, hampering comparisons and exchange between biobanks.
The overall objective of this project is to develop BioDORA as an Amsterdam infrastructure facilitating access to, and mining of clinical variables and biomaterials of patient cohorts and age-matched healthy individuals. It will assist researchers maintaining biobanks and those that require data or biomaterials from cohorts. In turn, this will accelerate biomarker discovery efforts, validation, and clinical implementation.

We will make use of the existing Research Data Platform (RDP) facility within Amsterdam UMC, which allows for automated and efficient re-use of clinical data from a variety of patient information systems (e.g. EPIC, GLIMS, OpenSpecimen) according to a Details Clinical Model (DCM) data standard. The project aligns with the Amsterdam UMC Imaging & Omics core facility data management and analysis infrastructure, which will 1) enable scientists access to data generated at 5 AUMC core facilities located on two locations; 2) develop FAIR data policies for CF users and harmonize FAIR data management; 3) enable combining data sets from different CFs for data analysis and AI modelling and; 4) enable fast HPC capacity ideally within Amsterdam research zone. Aligning BioDORA with the AMC CF Data & Compute experts team will catalyze innovations, minimize impact on costs for researchers, and enhance the visibility of Amsterdam UMC in the Dutch and European research infrastructure landscape.