Our UNIVIE Team, led by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Forgó, attended and presented at the BBMRI.at Annual Scientific and Ethical Advisory Board (SEAB) and Assembly of Consortium Partners (ACP) Meeting. The event was hosted by fellow BBMRI.at Partner, the University of Veterinary Medicine.
After a warm welcome to the participants by the BBMRI.at’s Coordination, the very comprehensive agenda for the day included an update on BBMRI-ERIC and an introduction and report on the overall progress of BBMRI.at’s third working period (BBMRI.at #3). UNIVIE’s Work Package (WP) 2’s achievements and next steps were presented by Professor Forgó and our colleague Katarzyna Barud, LL.M. Eur. The presentation covered the work carried out by UNIVIE providing legal support to the project through the Legal Helpdesk, the outputs of which are gradually being consolidated in the BBMRI.at webpage ‘Legal Issues’, including the BBMRI.at Legal Knowledge Base, accessible to a broader audience of researchers, in particular those working in the field of biobanking and biomedical research. These important legal resources – addressing legal and regulatory issues under national Austrian and European Union law, especially in the areas of data protection, data security, intellectual property rights and biodatabase law – are also made available through BBMRI.at news articles and the BBMRI-ERIC newsletter.
UNIVIE also reported on the activities carried out throughout the first year of BBMRI.at #3: these include two internal workshops organised by WP2 (one of which included a webinar which has been made available online) as well as the upcoming conference New era for health data: Secondary use of data in the EHDS and DGA and its implementation in Europe and Austria, which will happen on the 27th of February, on the premises of the University of Vienna. The registration for this event is now open! The programme includes 3 workshops and a panel discussion with respected Austrian experts from the fields of health, law, ethics and policymaking and has been jointly organised by BBMRI.at with the EU project Smart FOX (where the BBMRI.at partners UNIVIE and the Medical University of Graz are partners) and the CD Laboratory for Machine Learning Driven Precision Imaging (where UNIVIE is involved).
The afternoon of the BBMRI.at meeting was dedicated to other WP flash reports, as well as biobank reports including am insightful discussion on the outlook for the BBMRI.at biobanks. The day quickly progressed with the ACP meeting, with a section for receiving the first informal feedback from the SEAB, and a meaningful exchange covering the outlook & recommendations for next working period. Our sincere thanks to the BBMRI.at Management Committee, who made both the meeting and UNIVIE’s participation possible!
