EU-funded SPIDIA4P project wins CEN/CENELEC Standards + Innovation Award

Nominations for these awards came from the CEN and CENELEC national members and represent success stories of combining innovation and standardization from all over Europe. This year, a total of 23 nominations from 13 different members were received: 9 in the Project category, 9 in the Individual Researcher category and 5 in the new Young Researcher category. The Project and Individual Researcher nominees were all assessed based on three criteria: link with standardization, impact for the sector in which they operate, impact on the society and environment. The Young Researcher nominees were all assessed on the following 4 criteria: weight of standardization in the overall project, originality of their project, impact of the related outcome and the potential for their research to serve as material to support members outreach to research organizations.

The winner of the ‘Project’ category is the SPIDIA4P project, represented by the coordinator Dr. Uwe Oelmüller (QIAGEN) and nominated by DIN. The SPIDIA4P project has received funding from the European Union´s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 733112.

Through the project, 16 new standards have been developed so far, with 6 more under development, addressing the pre-analytical workflows applied to personalized medicine. Standardization work has been carried out in CEN/TC 140 “In vitro diagnostic medical devices”, WG 3 “Quality management in the medical laboratory” and in ISO/TC 212/WG 4. Dr. Uwe Oelmüller shared his thoughts on the importance of standards: “Patient specimen can significantly alter after collection from the body, e.g. during transport, storage and processing. This is a major error source for wrong diagnostic test results. Standards ensuring good quality patient specimen are therefore key enablers for improving diagnostics, biobanking and biomedical research”.

Andrea Wutte, Head of BBMRI-ERIC Quality Management: “The implementation of the standards in the biobanking field is a such an important step forward for the BBMRI-ERIC community. I am really proud being part of such a project and I would like to thank and congratulate all partners of the EU-funded #SPIDIA4P project and the Coordinator Uwe Oelmueller for these great achievements. They are are so valuable for our 22 Member and Observer States. The project has been and will continue to be an enrichment for #BBMRI_QM for the entire BBMRI-ERIC community and beyond. We very much hope for a follow-up project, as the standards resulting from these projects have a clear added value for sample quality in biobanks not only in Europe – but internationally. The society – we all – need to be able to trust the scientific quality of biomedical research, and quality-assured samples are an important building block for strengthening and developing trust in research. We will keep on contributing to standardization in Research and Biobanking!”

Read the full press release on CEN and CENELEC website

You can find out more about all of the 2021 nominees here.