Communities
MOLGENIS helps to create long-term research collaborations via continuous partnerships:
biobanking - birth cohorts - cancer - human exposome - genetics - multi-center cohort studies - rare disease - real-world evidence
biobanking
MOLGENIS work with individual biobanks and networks across Europe, coordinated by BBMRI-ERIC the European research infrastructure for biobanking. BBMRI-ERIC brings together all the main players from the biobanking field – researchers, biobankers, industry, and patients – to boost biomedical research. MOLGENIS contributes to IT services for individual biobanks and communities. Ultimately, our goal is to use these samples to make new treatments possible.
birth cohorts
Early life is an important window of opportunity to improve health across the full lifecycle. An accumulating body of evidence suggests that exposure to adverse stressors during early life leads to developmental adaptations, which subsequently affect disease risk in later life. Also, geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic differences are related to health inequalities from early life onwards. To address these important public health challenges, many European pregnancy and childhood cohorts have been established over the last 30 years. The enormous wealth of data of these cohorts has led to important new biological insights and important impact for health from early life onwards. The impact of these cohorts and their data could be further increased by combining data from different cohorts. Combining data will lead to the possibility of identifying smaller effect estimates, and the opportunity to better identify risk groups and risk factors leading to disease across the lifecycle across countries. Also, it enables research on better causal understanding and modelling of life course health trajectories. The EU Child Cohort Network, established by the Horizon2020-funded LifeCycle Project, brings together nineteen pregnancy and childhood cohorts, together including more than 250,000 children and their parents.
cancer
Our cancer communities propose to set up National and European Federated Cancer Research data hubs and to generate a series of use cases, addressing major challenges in cancer research. These ambitious and innovative, but realistic and focussed, use cases will be cross-border and trans-disciplinary research programmes built in a problem-solving manner. Results of these use cases will feed the Cancer Research data hub with findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable (FAIR) cancer research data.
human exposome
Unhealthy environments contribute to about three quarters of the global burden of disease. Exposure to air pollution and harmful chemicals, or a lack of access to a balanced diet or green spaces like city parks, are examples of factors that can negatively impact health and potentially increase the risk of developing various diseases. The human exposome refers to the integrated compilation of all the physical, chemical, biological and psychosocial factors, and their interactions, which have an impact on biology and health. This approach to studying environmental pollution is groundbreaking because it allows researchers to explore multiple types of exposure at the same time and their impact on health. Research on the exposome is paramount to better understand the causal pathways leading to common diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, immunological disorders, and non-communicable diseases. As a result, exposome research has the potential to answer key questions about how environmental exposures are associated with the development of disease.
genetics
MOLGENIS team has strong position in UMCG Dept of Genetics, and thus involved in both patient genome diagnostics, as well as large scale genomics research projects. In particular MOLGENIS high performance compute facility, VIP variant interpreration pipeline and FAIR genomes data standard are cornerstones of our passion for genetics.
multi-center cohort studies
MOLGENIS aims to help the community to enable researchers to obtain an overview of existing (meta)data from cohorts that may be used for scientific research, submit a request for use of data from multiple or all affiliated cohorts, and gain access using virtual research environments such as DataSHIELD, High performance computing or secure remote desktop environments.
rare disease
A rare disease is any disease that affects a small percentage of the population. Due to the low prevalence of each disease, medical expertise is rare, knowledge is scarce, care offerings inadequate and research limited. With MOLGENIS we aim to help and bring as much data together as we can and provide tools to analyse these data to improve diagnosis, treatment, and provide these patients the benefits of research.
real-world evidence
Pharmacoepidemiologic researchers have for decades used real-world data and generated real-world evidence (RWE) to support regulatory decision-making on medicines. For many stakeholders, increased data discoverability can have a clear, positive impact; it allows more efficient and higher-quality studies and enhances the transparency and reproducibility of data. Using MOLGENIS we aim to provide FAIR data catalogues to optimize description of RWE/RWD datasets to help improve health of all citizens.