The northern Lifelines research program has received a substantial subsidy. The Dutch Cohorts Consortium (NCC), a partnership between seven universities, UMCs and the RIVM, has received a subsidy of 17 million euros from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Lifelines is one of the participants.
More than 1 million euros will go to Lifelines and the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), two organizations that work closely together. The amount will be used to make it easier to compare different data sets, says Trynke de Jong of Lifelines.
“The main goal of the NCC is to create better cooperation between the cohorts,” says De Jong. She explains that the various databases that conduct health research each have their own spearhead. “Here at Lifelines we have a fairly broad focus, namely: healthier aging.”
De Jong says that how research is conducted differs per cohort. The way of data notation can also be different, which makes it more difficult to combine and analyze data sets. The NCC wants to use the subsidy to make this easier. De Jong: “So that it becomes easier for researchers to combine data from different databases in their research.”
Nearly twenty years ago, Lifelines began collecting health information from nearly 170,000 northerners. These people submit material every five years, such as urine, blood and hair. They also receive function measurements and answer questionnaires about their health.
Lifelines itself is not a research agency, but manages the so-called biobank. This contains all body materials, answered questionnaires and measurement results. Medical researchers all over the world can consult the dataset.