Workshop on Business in Biobanking & Population Health Data

Introducing the Pointlab program

Innovative products focused on healthy and active ageing can improve public health prevention programs and lead to better therapies for patients. The better these innovative products align with end-user demands, the greater their value to society and the greater their economic impact. EIT Health’s Population Intelligence lab (Pointlab) program in the Accelerator VALIDATE! activity line has identified the great potential of data and biomaterials from population- and patient-based cohort studies for innovative product development. Within these cohorts (clinical) data and biological samples (e.g. blood, urine, stool, stool, DNA) are collected from volunteering participants for future research. The extent and purpose they can be used for is limited though: protecting the privacy of the volunteers and ensuring the data and samples are used for research in line with the purpose they were collected for, is of utmost importance. Furthermore, the cohort’s custodians are typically embedded in academic organizations who struggle with engaging public private partnerships.

A workshop on business in biobanking & population health data

Pointlab’s mission is to enable and promote the interaction between population cohorts and biobanks, and the private sector (industries but also start/scale-ups and SMEs). Several EIT Health partners have built population or patient-based cohorts and biobanks in the past and recognize the challenges which the Pointlab program seeks to overcome. Several partners from private industry recognize the opportunities presented by these biobanks and want to collaborate with them. To further understand both perspectives and to seek opportunities together, a workshop is being organized by the University Medical Center Groningen and the University of Groningen Center of Entrepreneurship on Business in Biobanking and Population Health data taking place on the 29-30th of November in the City of Groningen.

Target audience

Population biobanking and data capture is not an exclusive academic or governmental affair: companies often own large amounts of end-user data that are already, or could be well (re-)used for product development by other business entities, i.e. SMEs, or research. With this workshop we aim to bring together (EIT Health) partners from both academia and industry that:

- Own/manage large population cohorts and biobanks or other types of population data and are either experienced in connecting this to business or eager to learn from other partners about business opportunities

- Partners with products (ideas or prototypes) that would like to connect and explore how population data can help (their) product development.

- Partners with experience in working with and/or developing data mining tools

Summary why to come

- Learn about the business potential of biobanks and population data in product development

- Connect with EIT Health partners that have access to population data repositories, data mining tools, and to SMEs eager to collaborate on this matter

- Touch base on ideas that could form the basis for (or enforce) EIT Health innovation projects

- Visit the beautiful city of Groningen, one of Europe’s biobanking hotspots, and visit ‘the coolest place in the Netherlands’; the LifeStore, one of the world’s largest biorepositories.

INTRESTED IN, AND WILLING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE PROGRAM?

Please get in contact with Roel van der Heijden.

You can find more information by downloading this brochure: