Life sciences have entered the era of big data. The ELIXIR-NL community infrastructure will leverage and develop state-of-the-art technologies to seamlessly bring together very different data -stored at multiple locations-, analytics and high-performance computing. An ‘app store-type’ protected environment will enable scientists to collaborate seamlessly in order to answer complex research questions that could not be answered previously. As a first remit, the infrastructure will be geared to empower personalised medicine and health within the framework of the pan-Dutch Health-RI initiative.

Childhood cancer is one of the leading causes of death among children. To better understand why children get cancer and provide better treatment options, we will identify congenital and cancer-specific DNA characteristics in a comprehensive manner. With the data collection “NL-4C: the Dutch Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Commons” we will collect DNA and clinical data on 4,000 childhood cancers for research. This data collection is therefore an important resource to accelerate childhood cancer research and, in the future, provide individualized treatments for children with cancer that result in more cure and less side effects.

Data-driven life science plays a key role in gaining new insights into health status and disease, in developing methods to promote health, and enabling health research & personalised medicine. The quality and success of data-driven life science critically depends on the availability of increasingly larger and richer series of human samples, health and disease phenotype data, and the methodological framework to derive information from them. Our DARE-4-LIFE application was crucial in this respect, as it was aimed at sharing, linking and analysing high-quality, comprehensive data across different resources and different levels in The Netherlands. The proposed infrastructure proposed would have built on the achievements of BBMRI.nl 1.0 (2008-2014) and 2.0 (2015-2020), resulting in a larger cluster of initiatives sharing data with new connections in the area of social science and nutrition. The unsuccessfulness of the application poses a direct threat to data-driven life sciences in The Netherlands. Specifically, discontinuation of the BBMRI infrastructure will disrupt the biobank community and the data sharing process. If biobanks in the Netherlands, within the BBMRI cluster and beyond, can no longer rely on an infrastructure to support and maintain data sharing, this is a huge loss for science, also in comparison to the international competition. Bridge funding will be essential to sustain a number of essential activities, namely: - Maintaining support to find & access samples and images, and steps towards integrating more data - Supporting researchers with Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications in data-driven life science research.