Biobank Norway 4 - a national biobank research infrastructure

As a national research infrastructure, Biobank Norway (BN1 2011-15,BN2 2016-20,BN3 2020-24) has been essential in setting up a state-of-the art, comprehensive biobank network throughout the entire country, at all the partner institutions, fulfilling a major prerequisite for excellent research activities. Biobank Norway 4 will gradually transition into a next phase of infrastructural development, targeted at: i) new and urgent needs related to the rapidly evolving national data landscape under the National Directory of e-Health (NDE), ii) laying foundations to advance precision medicine, and iii) tooling our network to respond to data-critical and analytic challenges that have emerged under the COVID-19 pandemic with great relevance for national preparedness in general. Mainly due to legal challenges, NDE has put the HAP-development on a temporary hold, but the ambition of BN is still to dovetail closely with HAP to facilitate seamless integration of BN-related data on the future HAP platform. To achieve our goals BN4 also collaborates with sister infrastructures, including other RCN-funded infrastructures such as ELIXIR (European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information), the NSC (Norwegian Sequencing Center), and BioMedData. BN4 will support ongoing work at helsenorge.no to facilitate the digital dialogue with research participants and biobank donors. This synergy of efforts will promote and leverage significant infrastructure investments that have already been made, also exploiting expertise and know-how at partner infrastructures. Another novelty is our merger with the infrastructure proposal for MoBa (iMoBa). This joint initiative greatly strengthens BN4 on several areas, e.g. a unified and strategically coherent plan for developing solutions on HAP, extending metadata and visualization tools to cover large genetic databases, and the assembly of a FAIR-compliant, harmonized cross-cohort genotype dataset for research towards precision medicine.

Going forward, BN4 will transition nto an exciting next phase of infrastructural development, targeted at: 1) new and urgent needs related to the rapidly evolving national data landscape under NDE, 2) laying foundations to advance precision medicine, and 3) tooling our network to respond to data-critical challenges that have emerged under the COVID-19 pandemic and have a clear relevance for national preparedness in general. In this work, BN4 dovetails closely with Directorate of e-Health to facilitate seamless integration of BN-related data on to a future centralized solution HAP. This includes piloting procedures for the first time with population-based data, which will lay the groundwork for future roll-out of other cohort studies and other types of biodata. In addition, the BN Dir for e-health interface will be instrumental in developing protocols to handle genetic data and will also play a vital role in other essential activities as reflected throughout this application. To achieve our goals BN4 collaborates closely with sister infrastructures such as ELIXIR, the NSC (Norwegian Sequencing Center), and BioMedData to achieve FAIRness with the genetic data. BN4 will also join ongoing work in helsenorge.no building tools that facilitate the dialogue with research participants and biobank donors. This synergy of efforts will greatly enable BN4 to leverage significant infrastructure investments that have already been made, avoiding duplicative efforts and exploiting expertise and know-how at our partner infrastructures. A novel feature of BN4 is our merger with the infrastructure proposal for MoBa (iMoBa). This joint initiative greatly strengthens BN4 on several arenas, including the development and implementation of a unified and strategically coherent plan for solutions within the Health Data Program, extending metadata and visualization tools to cover large genetic databases, and the assembly of a FAIR-compliant, harmonized dataset for research towards precision medicine.