EU-funded resource could help push boundaries of research on brain diseases while protecting privacy
The Human Brain project, a €1 billion EU neuroscience R&D funding and infrastructure scheme, has announced a repository of sensitive medical data for researchers.
Funded with €1 million and housed at the Charité university hospital in Berlin, the Ebrains Health Data Cloud will enable researchers to carry out studies using shared medical data, the Human Brain Project announced on 2 November.
EU rules require all research to protect patient privacy by complying with the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation, making the pooling of sensitive medical data challenging. But resources for sharing, storing and processing medical brain data could help tackle intractable diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as rarer diseases of the brain about which there is less data.
A group of research institutions, hospitals and companies behind the Ebrains Health Data Cloud will develop the service over the next two years, using existing infrastructure at the Charité university hospital that is already GDPR-compliant.
Petra Ritter, the project’s coordinator from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, said the resource “will spawn a multiplicity of innovations that may spark breakthroughs towards solving grand challenges of our times such as dementia”.