Biobank Metaportal to Enhance Collaborative Research:
sail.simbioms.org
Maria Krestyaninova, Ola Spjuth, Janna Hastings, Jörn Dietrich, Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann
In order to identify new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat
diseases, biobanks systematically collect samples of human
tissues and population-wide data on health and lifestyle.
Efficient access to population biobank data and to biomaterial is
crucial for development and marketing of new pharmaceutical
products, especially in the area of personalised medicine.
However, such access is hindered by legal and ethical
constraints, and by the huge semantic diversity across different
biobanks. To address these challenges, we have developed
SAIL, a sophisticated metaportal for biobank data annotation
across different collections and repositories, harmonised to allow
cross-biobank searchability, while preserving the anonymity and
privacy of the underlying data such that legal and ethical
requirements are met. We describe the technological architecture
and design of SAIL that allows us to meet these pressing
challenges, and give an overview of the current functionality of
the application. SAIL is available online at sail.simbioms.org,
and it currently contains around 200 000 samples from 14
collections. Full Text
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