Celebrating 20 years of Center for Medical Research (ZMF) at BBMRI.at partner Med Uni Graz

Since its opening in 2004, the Center for Medical Research (ZMF) has been home to many research groups from the Medical University of Graz (BBMRI.at coordinating partner). The ZMF provides important infrastructure for basic and translational biomedical research with more than 4000 m² of laboratory and office space.

The 20^th anniversary of the ZMF was celebrated from 3-5 July 2024 with various lectures, discussions, lab tours and a BBQ. As part of the event, the Austrian Bioinformatics (ATBI) Workshop 2024 took place at Med Uni Graz on July 3^rd. One of the lecture sessions revolved around research data management and included two contributions from BBMRI.at:

BBMRI.at National Node Director Georg Göbel was invited give a presentation on “Processing Research Data at Austrian Medical Universities towards the EHDS – Strategies, Concepts and Challenges”. In his talk, he highlighted the success story of BBMRI.at partner biobanks and their approach to link clinical data with samples, which was addressed in the BBMRI.at work programme of the past years: “Biobanks are innovative frontrunners in enabling research with clinical data and samples.” Austrian Medical Universities agreed upon a joint cooperation for secondary usage of health data for research purposes.

Following this presentation, Robert Primschitz, Team Manager of the IT Department of BBMRI.at partner Biobank Graz, gave a presentation on “Clinical Biobanking IT System Solution at Med Uni Graz”. A brief introduction to the biobank was followed by information on the university’s own and external data sources and how these are linked. The technical implementation of the graphical interface of the “summary” of these data sources, which makes the data searchable, was also presented, followed by a live demonstration.