The Instituto de Saúde Pública da Universidade do Porto (ISPUP) is one of the entities participating in EUCAN-Connect, a five-year Horizon 2020 project that aims to create an innovative platform for confidential storage and information analysis – sociodemographic, environmental and biological – from various European and Canadian cohorts to enable access to aggregate and large-scale information.
The goal is to collect data from different countries, in a safe way, for more personalized and preventive health care.
“By our own experience and involvement in other European consortia, population cohorts have been created (studies that aggregate sets of individuals sharing common characteristics) that are huge sources of data.
In certain situations, it would be useful to put all of these data together to meet specific research objectives. There are, however, challenges related to the security and transferability of these data that need to be addressed. EUCAN-Connect aims precisely to answer this question, explains Ana Cristina Santos, an ISPUP researcher, who belongs to the research team of the project.
To respond to the challenges of information security and data protection, EUCAN-Connect will create a platform that will allow the integration of all cohort data and the analysis of them in a federated way. “We want the existing information to be housed in a protected server that does not migrate anywhere. The computer platforms and the analyses algorithms gather aggregated information, avoiding the transfer of individual data. This frees us from constraints related to the new data protection law to which we are subject and, therefore, we are already anticipating what will happen in the future in this domain”, says the researcher.
On 7 and 8 March 2019, the kick-off meeting of the project took place in Groningen, The Netherlands, where the representatives of EUCAN-Connect were present. The team is made up of 12 European partners and one from Canada.
The project has an overall budget of 4 million and 700 thousand euros for all partners, during the five years of the project. ISPUP is one of the participating Portuguese institutions, together with the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Tecnologia e Ciência (INESC TEC).
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