On 14-15 June 2021, the SIMCor consortium held its M6 consortium e-meeting, aimed at summarising the work carried out in the first six months of the project and setting priorities for the next months to come.

The meeting agenda included, besides individual presentations of the M1-M6 and planning of M7-M12 work for all work packages, a series of open working sessions on key project issues, including data management and ethics, general research strategy, virtual cohort generation and validation, system requirements and virtual research environment (VRE) implementation. 

In fact, the Consortium has already reached a number of important milestones: (1) ethical clearance has been obtained for clinical data collection at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (CHA) and University College of London (UCL), while ethical review for animal studies is expected to be completed by August 2021 (M8).

Also, the Consortium has completed (2) definition of system requirements for the VRE, while a (3) VRE Cloud was completed ahead of schedule to allow the timely sharing of data from clinical partners with modeling partners, to facilitate their work.

The project (4) research strategy and  (5) data management plan were defined and a (6) preliminary ethical and legal compliance assessment for the project was prepared, in view of the final assessment to be completed by September 2021 (M9).

The M12 consortium meeting was scheduled for Monday and Tuesday 13-14 December 2021.