Continuation and strengthening of the Norwegian Clinical Research Infrastructure Network (NorCRIN) - "NorCRIN 2"

NorCRIN was established in 2010 by the University Hospitals in Norway. The initiative was strongly supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services and NorCRIN was outlined as a key element in the recent Norwegian Strategy for Health, Research and Innovation (HelseOmsorg21). The Ministry encouraged NorCRIN to apply for partnership in ECRIN (ecrin.org), the pan-European infrastructure designed to support multinational clinical research, which has been included in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI-roadmap). The multinational and shared infrastructure of ECRIN makes the European Union an integrated area for clinical research, providing researchers across Europe access to state-of-the art facilities, training and support services to study prevention, diagnosis and therapy. Hence, the active participation of NorCRIN in ECRIN will prove valuable for Norwegian research. A key challenge to improve clinical research is to establish a research environment with available competent personnel within clinical and translational health research. The main ambition of NorCRIN is to build an attractive research infrastructure for clinical and translational research in Norway, the Nordic Countries and Europe, for both industrial and academic collaborators.

The Norwegian Clinical Research Infrastructure “NorCRIN” was established in 2012 by the university hospitals in Norway. The initiative was strongly supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services, and was outlined as a key element in the Norwegian Strategy for Health, Research and Innovation (HelseOmsorg21). NorCRIN has since the start of the 5-year funding period (RCN 2015), through work packages (WPs) on practicalities such as Standard Operational Procedures (SOPs) also for trials beyond the pharmaceutical ones, monitoring, e-CRF, industry collaboration and requirement for early phase research facilities, been an important national infrastructure supporting clinical research. NorCRIN’ s partners now want to expand and further develop NorCRIN in a new project, NorCRIN 2, within the established organization with secretariat at St. Olavs hospital and local nodes at each partner, the six university hospitals in Norway. New WPs in NorCRIN 2 include data management, statistics advanced clinical trial methodology, pragmatic trial/register based RCTs, internationalization, and patient and public involvement. Thus major challenges related to state-of-the-art aspects of clinical and translational medical research are addressed. To meet these and to be able to serve the clinical researchers adequately, it is necessary that NorCRIN 2 further advances and broadens its capacity in each partner and the consortium as a network as described above. The application for NorCRIN 2 addresses specific needs in clinical research, corresponding to the goal of the call: to give the Norwegian research community access to relevant state-of-the-art infrastructures that contributes to and supports research of high quality.