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Health-RI major partner in European Commission’s Genomic Data Infrastructure project
Today, the European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project kicks-off in Brussels, Belgium. This €40 million GDI project, coordinated by ELIXIR, is jointly funded by the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme and through co-funding from participating Member States. In The Netherlands, Health-RI and three Health-RI partner organizations (Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen, Erasmus MC, and the Netherlands Cancer Institute) are also included in the European project.
Health-RI regards GDI as an important project that fits in the mission of Health-RI to bring together healthdata infrastructure initiatives. In GDI the goal is to enable secure access to human genome data and corresponding clinical data across Europe by creating a data infrastructure. Leone Flikweert, CEO of Health-RI: “What GDI wants to achieve for Europe with regards to human genomic data, is our goal for healthdata in the Netherlands. We will develop an integrated health data infrastructure for research and innovation that enables the reuse of data. Reuse of health data is necessary for a learning healthcare system. This is essential to realise better healthcare for citizens and patients.”
The Health-RI infrastructure will therefore contribute to improved health for the Dutch population and will connect to the European GDI infrastructure. Health-RI intends to implement the GDI in a federated fashion: through the involvement of the omics working group in the Architecture theme of Health-RI, the infrastructure will allow participation from all Health-RI regional nodes.
“The GDI project faces the same challenges as we do in Health-RI. GDI also deals with ELSI issues, portal development, and involving (European) Nodes. It is vital to exchange knowledge and to connect to European developments, says Leone Flikweert. Since the project touches on almost all aspects of Health-RI, many other themes and activities in Health-RI are also involved, including FAIR Data Implementation, ELSI, and Services. Part of the project will also be working from the start on the long-term sustainability of GDI-provided infrastructure.
If you are interested in learning more about our participation in this project, please contact rob.hooft@health-ri.nl