SYNCHROS (SYNergies for Cohorts in Health: integrating the ROle of all Stakeholders)

SYNCHROS addresses the need to exploit in an optimal way the European population and patient cohort studies, including well-designed clinical trials, through a coordination and support action based on existing European and international cohorts and through an alliance with leading researchers and relevant research networks.

As a coordination and support action SYNCHROS aims to establish a sustainable European strategy for the development of the next generation of integrated population, patient and clinical trial cohorts, thereby contributing to an international strategic agenda for enhanced coordination of cohorts globally. This will address the practical, ethical and legal, and the methodological challenge to optimising the exploitation of current and future cohort data, towards the development of stratified and personalised medicine as well as facilitating health policy

In order to achieve this objective, SYNCHROS will map the cohort landscape in Europe and large international initiatives, identify the best methods for integrating cohort data, identify solutions for addressing practical, ethical and legal challenges in integrating data across patient, clinical trial and population cohorts, and evaluate the use of emerging and new data collection technologies and types of data.

Together with intensive stakeholder involvement (researchers, patients, funding bodies, clinicians, coordinators of previous harmonization and integration exercises), strategy briefs will be written and used to conduct stakeholder dialogues to generate consensus following a deliberative process and implementation science methods.We aim to make sustainable recommendations on standards to improve future sample, data collection and data sharing methods and disseminate this information so as to contribute to defining an international strategic agenda for better coordination of cohorts globally.

SYNCHROS opens the door to the comprehensive use of the enormous potential of these studies to accelerate the development of personalized medicine to improve clinical practice and improve the capacity of public health interventions to address the health challenges of the population.