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 central to the establishment of a modern and advanced nationwide biobank network at all partner institutions and has fulfilled a key requirement for promoting outstanding research. Biobank Norge 4 will gradually be further developed to: i) meet new and urgent needs related to a new national data landscape, previously led by the Directorate for e-Health (NDE), now FHI and the Directorate of Health, ii) lay the foundation for promoting personalized medicine, and iii) develop the biobank network to meet data-critical, analytical challenges that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic with great relevance to national preparedness in general. Due to legal challenges with data sharing in a cloud solution, the development HAP was stopped, but BN is heavily involved in an alternative solution developed by the universities based on TSD (UiO), HUNT Cloud (NTNU) and SAFE (UiB). BN is working on a way in for access to all biobanks, a solution that will be integrated with Helsedataservice and their researcher portal for access to register data. To achieve our goals, BN4 also collaborates with national and European "sister infrastructures", including other Research Council-funded infrastructures such as ELIXIR, NorCRIN, NSC (Norwegian Sequencing Center) and BioMedData. BN4 will support the ongoing work at helsenorge.no to facilitate a digital dialogue with research participants and biobank donors. This synergy will optimize the use of the significant infrastructure investments that have already been made by utilizing the expertise and knowledge of partner infrastructures. BN4 also involves a merger with MoBa's infrastructure application (iMoBa). This joint initiative significantly strengthens BN4 in several areas, i.a. through a uniform and strategically coherent plan for the development of good digital administrative solutions, including data banks for returning analysis results which can in turn be used by all researchers upon application. We contribute to the further development of metadata and visualization tools for large genetic databases, and the compilation of a FAIR-compatible, harmonized genotype data set across cohorts, an important contribution in the field of personalized medicine. BN has also started a structured research collaboration with industrial players, i.a. with a start-up company partially supported by the Research Council. BN is heavily involved in the European research infrastructure for biobanks, BBMRI-ERIC and leads through NTNU, in collaboration with BBMRI-ERIC, a recently started (01.01.2024) EU project to develop a new concept for a European research infrastructure for large medical cohorts (INTEGRATE LMedC).