Three of the nation’s top pediatric medical centers—Cincinnati Children’s, Boston Children’s and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—report early signs of success in sharing hard-to-gather data about rare childhood diseases after launching the Genomics Research & Innovation Network (GRIN).

Details appear in a study published Sept. 4, 2019, in Genetics in Medicine.

Teams at all three hospitals worked to harmonize study consent and data management protocols through their institutional review boards (IRBs). Now, investigators can get secured access to a rapidly expanding collection of de-identified data from biobanks and related databases.

Planners have worked since 2015 to work out details and set up the shared system. The teams also launched pilot projects to demonstrate the network’s capabilities and apply them to active studies.

“Investigators at all sites enthusiastically collaborated on the pilot studies, resulting in multiple publications. Investigators have also begun to successfully utilize the infrastructure for grant applications,” the co-authors write.

Stay tuned for more details to appear on the CincyInformatix innovation blog.

Read previous coverage of the GRIN network