Research IT project TraIT is granted €2.25 million from the Dutch Cancer Society to build an integrated Dutch biomedical research infrastructure. By gathering, processing and storing data on a large scale, more and more opportunities in cancer research arise to accelerate and improve diagnostics and treatments. An efficient and integrated research infrastructure is essential for the storage en processing of these large amounts of data. With the TraIT project an important step can be taken to develop such an infrastructure.
TraIT, the Translational Research IT project, developed an online suite of software applications that has been open for translational researchers since 2011. To date, almost 3000 users from over 400 (inter-)national studies are actively working with these applications. TraIT is one of the pioneers of the integrated Dutch infrastructure for health research, known as Health-RI, in which multiple infrastructure programmes work together towards an integrated national infrastructure for personalized medicine.
Corine van Vliet, manager Research Funding Dutch Cancer Society: “The contribution of the Dutch Cancer Society to TraIT contributes to the establishment of Health-RI. With this initiative biomedical research can result more efficiently and faster in better diagnostics and personalized treatment. Cancer patients will benefit from the realization of a single national research infrastructure.”
Gerrit Meijer, Principal Investigator TraIT, Head of Pathology NKI: “With this grant the Dutch Cancer Society has set a crucial step in professionally facilitating translational cancer research. TraIT is an essential building block for Health-RI, the national infrastructure for translational research that prepares Dutch scientific research for the future.”
Jan-Willem Boiten, Projectmanager TraIT, Lygature: “TraIT takes care of time-consuming practical issues so that researchers are able to focus and do what they do best. TraIT enables data sharing and makes it possible to further build on the data, even after the study has been finalized. Research funders will see an increase in the return of investment.”
Research infrastructure is an important theme of the Dutch National Research Agenda. Health-RI is initiated from the Dutch branches of the European infrastructures BBMRI, ELIXIR and EATRIS, upon invitation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Up till now Health-RI brought together initiatives such as TraIT, Parelsnoer, NFU, DTL, Lygature and Health~Holland, as well as PALGA and IKNL.
