Road to effective data curation for translational research

Translational research today is data-intensive and requires multi-stakeholder collaborations to generate and pool data together for integrated analysis. This leads to the challenge of harmonization of data from different sources with different formats and standards, which is often overlooked during project planning and thus becomes a bottleneck of the research progress. We report on our experience and lessons learnt about data curation for translational research garnered over the course of the European Translational Research Infrastructure & Knowledge management Services (eTRIKS) program (https://www.etriks.org), a unique, 5-year, cross-organizational, cross-cultural collaboration project funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative of the EU. Here, we discuss the obstacles and suggest what steps are needed for effective data curation in translational research, especially for projects involving multiple organizations from academia and industry.