The Walder Foundation's Boosters, Breakthroughs, and Biorepositories (B3) grant highlights the power of multi-university collaboration and biorepository synergy. Under this grant, the Open Commons Consortium (OCC), in partnership with Rush University Medical Center and Loyola Medical Center, successfully completed a initiative led by Jeffrey Schneider.
Leveraging Gen3 Platform services, including the Discovery Portal, the team developed a platform to manage virtual COVID-19 biobank metadata effectively. The platform enables seamless management and access to biobank sample metadata between Rush and Loyola Medical Centers, making it easily searchable and accessible to the COVID-19 research community.
The project was executed in two phases:
Phase 1: The Initial work stream involved developing a Proof of Concept using the Chicagoland Region Data Commons Discovery Portal in the Quality Assurance (QA) environment.
Phase 2: The secondary work stream focused on enhancing the Proof of Concept with advanced features and migrating the platform to the Chicagoland Regional Data Commons production environment.
The fully deployed platform is now accessible to researchers and partners, streamlining collaboration and enabling biorepository data integration with the Joint Loyola-Rush Biorepository.
This achievement marks a significant step in enhancing accessibility and collaboration within the research community, demonstrating the transformative potential of collective innovation