Industry Collaboration
Biobank Norway is a national biobank research infrastructure comprising all human biobanks nation-wide, including hospital based disease-specific ones as well population-based cohort studies. Our mandate is to facilitate internationally competitive biobank services to perform basic, clinical and epidemiological medical research. We want to contribute to the utilization of these unparalleled resources to facilitate national and global research and innovation projects that ultimately will contribute to improved health care.
Biobank Norway has an ambitious to increase industry research and innovation projects and recognizes the importance of public-private partnership to advance medicine. This web page represents a starting point to find out more about biobanks and health data from Norway to be applied in your industry research based collaboration projects.
Norway's assets
Biobank Norway is the gateway to Norway´s unparalleled resources within biobanks and associated sources of health data. The integration of health data and samples derived from the biobanks and registries in Norway, makes it possible to set up research collaborations to enhance knowledge on the cause of diseases, how diseases may be prevented and how to develop better treatments of diseases. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to improved health care.
Norway, though a relatively small country with 5.3 million inhabitants, possesses some features that makes the country unique for conducting research based on health data:
11-digit PIN
All Norwegian residents have a unique 11-digit personal ID that penetrates all layers of society including health care. The personal ID makes it possible to link data across different sources to create a longitudinal deep phenotypic characterization of disease and outcomes that is hard to retrieve elsewhere.
Unparalleled biobank resource
Norway has a long tradition within biobank studies. Our oldest biobank was set up in 1972. Today, more than 800,000 Norwegians are enrolled in consented population-based biobank studies and disease-specific clinical biobanks.
Public health care sector
Norway has an advanced and publicly driven health care sector. Mandatory and complete collections of health data minimize loss-of-follow-up and selection bias. This makes it possible to follow the disease trajectories over a long period of time.
Trust as a hallmark
A hallmark for the Norwegian population is a high level of public trust and willingness to participate in biobank studies. A public health care system, a proper governance structure and a high standard for data-privacy have secured this.
Altruistic mindset
Research shows that Norwegians possesses an altruistic mindset in terms of participating in biobank studies. On average a Norwegian will contribute with data and samples to research that also serves the greater good and not only an immediate personal gain.
Unique health data infrastructure
The key to the uniqueness of the Norwegian health data infrastructure, is the integration of data from biobanks with data from a range of nation-wide, mandatory and complete registries and electronic medical records.
