EUCAN-Connect aims to promote collaborative and multidisciplinary research in high-value cohort and molecular data on a large scale in order to improve statistical power with the aims of making new discoveries about the factors that impact human life course and facilitating their translation into personalized diagnostics, treatment and prevention policies. The overall concept of EUCAN-Connect is:
- Deploy FAIR federated data platform to make cohort data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable and enable large-scale pooled analyses using federated technologies and to deposit, curate and analyse data with privacy-protecting features that account for ethical, legal and societal implications;
- Promote use of EUCAN-Connect platform, first proof-of-concept in smaller scientific communities focussed on cardio-metabolic, respiratory and musculoskeletal health and disease outcomes across the life course then scaling up to the wider cohort research community to maximize the diversity of data available;
- Sustainably increase discovery power for personalized medicine using cohort data while involving public research infrastructures led by BBMRI-ERIC and involving, where possible, SMEs for professional support (including business models around data and infrastructure usage), starting with the one SME partner involved in this project.
- Using cutting edge information- and bio-technology, and building on extensive experience and understanding of the governance and handling of health-related research data, EUCAN-Connect will set up a meta-network that bridges existing and emerging cohort networks, federates currently parallel cataloguing and curation efforts, and standardizes, scales-up and matures cohort data access and federated analysis infrastructure.
