OpenClinica And TraIT: A Dutch National Research Infrastructure

Is it possible to set up an IT infrastructure for translational research for an entire country? The Dutch Translational Research IT (TraIT) project (http://www.ctmm-trait.nl/) believes it is. Admittedly, The Netherlands is not exactly the same size as China or the US, but nevertheless already 26 partners from industry and academia to collaborate in this consortium to organize, deploy, and manage a nationwide IT infrastructure for data and workflow management targeted specifically at the needs of translational research. It includes the Dutch university medical centers, notable companies like Philips, and charities such as Dutch heart and cancer foundations.

At its outset, TraIT worked closely with selected translational research projects and scientists, piloting potential solutions with real research data from these projects. This work resulted in the selection and implementation of central TraIT services for clinical data gathering (OpenClinica) and image archival and retrieval (NBIA). TraIT has now reached a very interesting phase where the first IT solutions put in place in each of the four major domains of translational research (clinical, imaging, biobanking and experimental (any-omics)) are starting to flourish...