The InterConnect approach optimises the use of existing data to enable new research into the causes of diabetes and obesity.

The variation in the risk of diabetes and obesity between different countries and continents around the world is considerably greater than the variation in risk within individual countries. This population level heterogeneity in diet, physical activity and disease outcomes is largely unexplained because physically bringing data together from cohort studies across the world is constrained by governance, ethical and legal challenges.

The FP7-funded InterConnect project (2013 – 2017) took a new approach to enabling cross-cohort analyses. Rather than physically bringing the data together for analysis, it ‘took the analysis to the data’. Exemplar projects were used to understand the real-life implementation issues and to demonstrate the effectiveness of this federated meta-analytical approach. These were followed by a series of projects to investigate population variation in diabetes risk with a series of dietary factors.

Funding has now ended for the InterConnect project. For groups wishing to follow the InterConnect process to address a research question, the following steps give a broad indication of what work needs to be funded, with more details available on this website:

• A lead researcher assembles a group of cohorts with data relevant to the research question and guides these cohorts in harmonising their data to common scales and measures, optionally cataloguing the cohorts and associated metadata for future use.
• An infrastructure expert assesses the technical resources and skills available at each participating cohort to determine the most inclusive solution for participation in the analysis: This might be federated meta-analysis via DataSHIELD, data access via local secure analysis environments or traditional results-sharing/data transfer.
• An analysis expert works with the lead researcher and infrastructure expert to make the data available for analysis and bring together the results obtained via the range of technical solutions.
• Each cohort may need to provide resources to prepare and host their data set, depending on the solution that has been selected for participation.

Other projects currently following a similar approach are:

This project was initially funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 602068