The article, published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, addresses the sharing and reuse of data, challenges, and possible solutions within the international Primavera project.

The Hospital Virgen Macarena recently published a scientific article in the prestigious journal Clinical Microbiology and Infection about the challenges of data sharing in research within the European Community. Sharing patient data in clinical research can help avoid unnecessary study duplication and increase the efficiency of future research. However, there are various challenges to making data sharing a reality, such as obtaining permissions from researchers and ethics committees, ensuring the anonymity of the data, and having IT platforms that provide access to the data. These barriers make data sharing still uncommon in practice.

The article, titled “How to share and reuse data – challenges and solutions from the Primavera project,” describes the process of identifying and compiling datasets with anonymized individual patient data for secondary data analysis. Through a systematic search, the authors identified 108 studies on antimicrobial-resistant infections from members of the Primavera consortium, of which eight met all legal requirements and shared their datasets.

During the process, the authors identified challenges and possible solutions in data-sharing activities related to a lack of interest from researchers, the challenges posed by ethical and legal requirements, the complexity of data management procedures, specific requirements for public access to data, and insufficient training and funding.

This manuscript, which can be accessed through this link, was recently published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, a highly prestigious journal of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.

The data will be used by the Primavera consortium to develop mathematical models that will assess the impact of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies on antimicrobial resistance and will be made publicly available through the European Clinical Research Alliance on Infectious Disease platform.

Primavera Project

The aim of the European project, coordinated by the European Vaccine Initiative, is to develop an open-access web platform—available to the entire scientific community—that combines mathematical models with a microbiological, epidemiological, and clinical and economic data repository, serving as a reference for making sustainable decisions over time regarding the use of vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.

The Hospital Universitario Virgen Macarena is participating in this international project by leading Work Package 3 through the research group coordinated by doctors from the Infectious Diseases Department, Jesús Rodríguez Baño and Mariana Guedes, from the Clinical Research Group on Infectious Diseases of the Seville Institute of Biomedicine.

The project is supported by the Fundación para la Gestión de la Investigación en Salud de Sevilla (FISEVI), an entity that also collaborates with the Infectious Diseases Department of the Virgen Macarena University Hospital on more than ten European and national projects and clinical trials.