The National DNA Bank Carlos III, University of Salamanca, participates in the International Project RD-Connect with the aim of establishing a global infrastructure that links up all the results about rare diseases research. This initiative is part of an ambitious project funded by the European Union which primary objective is to develop 200 therapies for rare diseases in 2020.
RD Connect will link up databases, registries, biobanks and clinical bioinformatics data used in rare disease research into a central resource for researchers worldwide, in order to enhance the study of these rare pathologies.
The National DNA Bank already stores some collections of samples from rare diseases; this would be useful for the project, which will be extended by 6 years, and pretend to join researchers from all over the world.
The 80% of rare diseases have a genetic component, so the analysis of DNA from patients is an essential tool for researchers. Only 5 people per 10.000 inhabitants suffer any rare diseases. However, if we think about rare diseases as a group, taking into account that we know between 6.000 and 8.000 difeferent types, 1 per 17 people suffer one of these pathologies.
The RD-Connect project joins 44 different institutions. In Spain, besides the National DNA Bank, the participants centers are: Centro Nacional de Analisis Genómico (CNAG), Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO), Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Raras (Ciberer), l Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (Idibaps) and the IRDiRC (participating more than 4000 research groups) .

Enlace relacionado: http://rd-connect.eu/