The European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder Cardiogenomics Portfolio brings together seven European research projects focused on cardiovascular diseases. The MIRACLE project, coordinated by Professor Minna Kaikkonen-Määttä at the University of Eastern Finland, is one of these seven projects.
Collaboration within the portfolio extends beyond formal reporting requirements. The projects have formed smaller, theme-based subportfolios that focus on shared research questions and common objectives. As one of the first concrete output of this portfolio work, a web-based data platform focused on atherosclerosis research data, AtheroPortal, has now been released.
AtheroPortal provides access to human atherosclerotic plaque research data. The technical lead for the platform has been MIRACLE partner UMC Utrecht, where Professor Gerard Pasterkamp leads the project. UMC Utrecht also hosts the underlying Athero-Express biobank data.
“AtheroPortal is a great example of how European portfolio initiatives and the sub-portfolios within them can produce research infrastructures that benefit the scientific community at large and support the development of new treatments for cardiovascular and vascular diseases,” Kaikkonen-Määttä says.
“With this first version, you can now explore and analyse clinical data and bulk RNA-seq data from the plaques of the Athero-Express. A great step towards making Athero-Express data easier and faster to access, so we can reach new insights together more quickly,” says Associate Professor Sander van der Laan, Assistant Professor at UMC Utrecht, who has played a key role in the development of the portal.
The purpose of AtheroPortal is to facilitate researchers’ access to data on atherosclerosis, and thereby accelerate the identification of new disease mechanisms, biomarkers, and potential drug development targets. In the future, the platform is also intended to include proteomics, eQTL, methylation, and genetic data, and discussions are underway to expand the data to other biobanks in Germany, Finland, and Sweden.
AtheroPortal exposes only aggregate, summary-level data. Researchers requiring access
to individual-level data or biological samples are still required to complete the formal Athero-Express access procedure via Dataverse.
The development of AtheroPortal has been supported in part by the MIRACLE project and the HealthHolland 'Getting the Perfect Image' project.
Explore AtheroPortal at www.atheroportal.nl
The projects in the Cardiogenomics Portfolio were launched in late 2023. A report published this spring summarises the collaborative efforts to date.
For further information, please contact:
Professor Minna Kaikkonen-Määttä, https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/minna.kaikkonen-maatta/
The MIRACLE project https://sites.uef.fi/miracle/
