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History

BBMRI.nl has been established through two subsequent programs funded by NWO (BBMRI.nl 1.0 and 2.0) and Health-RI (BBMRI.nl 3.0). 

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    BBMRI.nl 1.0 (2008-2014)

    • Making a national inventory of biobanks bringing together 193 of these and developing a freely accessible catalog. 
    • Enriching a large number of biobank samples (>100,000) with omics molecular data. 
    • Establishing governance able to deal with the complex challenges of a national infrastructure. 
    • Ensuring legal compliance by introducing digital enforcement of biobank participants’ rights. 
    • Whole genome sequencing of 250 parents-offspring families, providing more detailed insight into Dutch genetic variation (GoNL). 
    • Establishing European collaboration by joining BBMRI-ERIC. 
    • Starting public communication and outreach by actively reporting to the general public. 
    • Carrying out 94 projects focusing on local harmonization, improved logistics, and enrichment strengthening participation of Dutch biobanks in 36 EU, US, and/or global consortia. 
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    BBMRI.nl 2.0 (2015-2019)

    • Bundling the national biobanking landscape by integrating BBMRI, EPI2, and CTMM-TraIT. 
    • Integrating images and clinical data sets, including the Dutch national pathology archive, the Dutch national cancer registry, the Parelsnoer initiative, and others. 
    • Accomplishing enrichment with omics data across multiple biobanks resulting in a large series of papers in top journals. 
    • Winning the Dutch Data Prize 2018 and receiving numerous awards to the PIs. 
    • Providing user access for biomolecular research and pilot projects for participatory biobanking. 
    • Establishing the ELSI Service Desk through collaborations between BBMRI-NL, Health-RI, and SURFsara. 
    • Enabling public participation by setting up a patient and public advisory council for BBMRI. 
    • Co-founding Health-RI, the Dutch national infrastructure for personized medicine and health research. 
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    BBMRI.nl 3.0 (2020-2025)

    • Integrating existing biobank initiatives into a national infrastructure for health and life science data (Health-RI). 
    • Promoting evidence-based biomaterial pre-analysis by initiating a Dutch Biobank Protocol. 
    • Developing a national biobank metadata scheme. 
    • Systematic onboarding of biobank collections through fair datapoints towards a national health and life science data catalog (with Health-RI). 
    • Developing templates and procedures for the uniform assessment of biobank activities in the Netherlands. 
    • Developing a guideline for the evaluation of biobank collections.  
    • Organizing two highly successful national Biobank Days. 
    • Participating in the co-creation of a roadmap for the second decade of BBMRI-ERIC. 
    • Starting initiatives for greening biobank operations. 
    • Collaborating with other ESFRIs within Health-RI's ‘House of research infrastructures and shared services portal’. 
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    BBMRI.nl 4.0 (2026-2030)

    • Enable state-of-the-art use cases that test and improve the infrastructure and inspire novel research. 
    • Applying AI-powered curation and analysis of health data and images for the enrichment of biobanks. 
    • Accelerating biobank interoperability through developing and implementing a Dutch Biobank Standard. 
    • Preparing BBMRI-NL for the EHDS by alignment with European standards, enhancing data accessibility and reusability. 
    • Fostering biobank greening through self-assessment of the environmental impact of biobanks, concrete measures for saving energy, and digitalization of consent and assessment procedures. 
    • Disseminating biobank knowledge through websites, social media, gatherings of focus groups, training, and the national Biobank Day. 
    • Aligning and intensifying activities matching the 10-Year Roadmap of BBMRI-ERIC and fostering collaboration with other LSRIs. 

Former national node directors 

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