OBiBa selected as partner of the FP7-EU BioSHaRE program

OBiBa and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) have been selected as important partners of the recently approved FP7 European Union BioSHaRE program.

BioSHaRE is a consortium of leading biobanks and international researchers from all domains of biobanking science. The overall aim of the project is to build upon tools and methods available to achieve solutions for researchers to use pooled data from different cohort and biobank studies. This aim will be achieved through the development of harmonization and standardization tools, implementation of these tools and demonstration of their applicability.  The mission of BioSHaRE is to ensure the development of harmonized measures and standardized computing infrastructures enabling the effective pooling of data and key measures of life-style, social circumstances and environment, as well as critical sub-components of the phenotypes associated with common complex diseases.

OBiBa, as a main partner of the BioSHaRE-IT Working Group, will receive financial support over the next three years to develop an open source data harmonization platform for use by the different scientific BioSHaRE projects. This new platform, developed in collaboration with the DataSHAPER team, will be based on the OBiBa Opal application and will integrate many innovative tools such as DataSHIELD (Wolfson et al. Int. J. Epidemiol., 2010)