Foreign Investments Europe Lifelines popular among researchers worldwide

Lifelines popular among researchers worldwide

The Lifelines bio-database, which so far contains blood and urine samples and related medical data of 50,000 residents of the Northern Netherlands, is very popular among the scientific community. Due to the scope of the project, it is now already very attractive to researchers worldwide. At the Lifelines head office on the UMCG (University Hospital) Groningen site, around eighty requests have already been received from researchers wanting to use the database for their research projects. This was reported in the Leeuwarder Courant newspaper. The first scientific publication on Lifelines is expected soon in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The unique Lifelines project was initiated in 2006 and is aimed at monitoring the health of three generations of Northerners over a 30 year period, in order to gather a wealth of data on a healthy ageing process. Eventually, Lifelines plans to collect and manage the data of 165,000 residents of the Northern Netherlands, which represents ten percent of the population in this region. Theo Sikkema, acquisitions and maintenance manager, reported to the Leeuwarden Courant newspaper that this will certainly be possible, when considering the willingness of the Northerners until now. The Lifestore is to be commissioned in 2013, in order to store all these blood and urine samples. This will be a freezer the size of a sports hall on the UMCG site, where the material can be stored at a temperature of minus 80 degrees Celsius. 

_{Source: Leeuwarder Courant (June 7, 2011)}