Rare disease platform project designed to foster collaboration and disseminate resource information gets underway
RareDiseasePlatform (RDPlatform), a three-year project supported through the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement nr HEALTH-F2-2008-201230) designed to foster collaboration between rare disease research and development stakeholders throughout Europe had its official kick-off on 20 June. Picking up where FP6 OrphanPlatform left off, RDPlatform takes the products delivered under the OrphanPlatform project as the basis for its development. The overarching goal is to facilitate research in the field of rare diseases. In particular, tools developed to foster the collaboration between academic teams, SMEs and major companies will allow key players to identify each other more readily in order to work together with the shared aim of providing diagnostic and medical products as efficiently as possible. The project will also improve the identification of key research resources. In addition, the information gathered during the development of this project will provide funding agencies with an accurate and current vision of what is being sponsored at the national and international levels, thus providing a foundation for targeting future calls for proposals.
RDPlatform brings together organisations from 13 European countries to address the unmet needs of the European rare disease research community identified via the FP6 OrphanPlatform project. These include the need to identify and communicate the existence of expert groups, ongoing research projects, technological platforms, databases, patient registries and biobanks relevant to RD research throughout Europe. The project will also communicate the partnerships needs of researchers from academia and the biopharmaceutical industry. RDPlatform thus intends to contribute to the market transfer of innovative therapeutics, medical devices and diagnostic tools, and accelerate the research process on rare diseases. The Orphanet information portal will serve as the vehicle for disseminating data collected through RDPlatform.
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