Aridhia announces expansion as it unveils digital platform in major Netherlands university medical centre

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - May 26, 2016 - A Scottish clinical and translational informatics company has announced it is part of a consortium selected to deliver a digital research environment based on its AnalytiXagility informatics platform to one of the Netherland’s most prestigious university medical centres, with the aim of facilitating biomedical research on an unprecedented scale.

The consortium, incorporating Aridhia, ICT service provider Vancis, and clinical datasets experts MGRID, are delivering their world-leading Research as a Service (RaaS) platform to Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre (UMC) in a three-year deal, making it the first university medical centre in the Netherlands to offer a digital platform to all research teams across the institution.

The RaaS platform will provide a data management and biomedical analytics environment for up to 1,600 clinical research projects over the next three years enabling Radboud UMC to accelerate the delivery of clinical research studies into clinical practice.

The goal is to help researchers rapidly extract value and meaning from multiple data types, improve collaboration, reduce risks to data security, and deliver fast time to insight, all while lowering costs, and ensuring reproducibility and scalability of research.

Mathias Prokop, head of Department Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre said: "The Digital Research Environment (DRE) is an essential step in research of the future: better structure, documentation, reuse of data and collaboration lead to acceleration of research and increase output and quality.”

The contract signifies substantial growth for Aridhia, one of Scotland’s data science success stories. The company has recently expanded its service offering to include an ‘ecosystem edition’ of its popular AnalytiXagility workspaces in order to meet the needs of large-scale clinical research and precision medicine centres.

Chris Roche, Aridhia’s CEO, said of the partnership: “We are delighted to bring our AnalytiXagility platform into this venture. Radboud really understands the need for academic medical centres to adopt breakthrough technologies in order to accelerate the discovery of insights and increase institutional competiveness.”

The win adds to the company’s growing number of European projects as it exports AnalytiXagility to a number of prominent research collaborations across the continent, including the ground-breaking European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) project, an Innovative Medicines Initiative funded research programme.

Dr Ruth McKernan, Chief executive of the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK said, “We’re tremendously proud to have helped fund Aridhia’s original development of their AnalytiXagility platform four years ago. Their resulting growth and expansion into overseas markets exemplifies the role we play in supporting innovative ideas through to successful commercialisation.”

Aridhia’s head count is also set to increase as it aims to hire new staff members, including data scientists, platform engineers and project managers due to the company’s continued success and the growth of its customer base.