Regular TTO contact ensures collaboration agreements on time
Professor Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen from the Department of Public Health is co-leading a large EU project (BIOSFER), which involves many legal documents and collaboration agreements. She has therefore been in regular contact with TTO right from the start: “The support structure that has been established at AU is really good. I hold regular meetings with the department’s contact lawyers from TTO to go through our collaboration agreements, the rules governing data processing, data processing agreements etc. It is reassuring and keeps things rolling,” says Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen.
Restructuring added momentum
When Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen received the EU grant, she immediately contacted TTO. Initially, there was not a lot of progress, and she did not have a regular contact. But following the restructuring of TTO, things took off. “It was a relief to be assigned a team of regular contacts as our legal partners and to have regular meetings in the calendar. It’s absolutely crucial for our partners that agreements are in place, and there are also a lot of legal issues surrounding data collection. The project would grind to a halt if the legal documents were not ready on time. At the meetings, we go through everything to ensure that the collection of both questionnaire-based and clinical data can run smoothly. Getting to this point has taken a lot of effort by everyone. But the new structure means that we’ve been able to make scientific progress and make our collaboration with our international partners work,” says Cecilia.
In other words, we need a solid legal foundation for our research. And Cecilia believes that having a regular contact is crucial, as the lawyer gets to know the project extremely well and takes a genuine interest. It has also made it possible for her to get answers to other legal questions.
Facts about TTO assistance to Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen
Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen, Siri Håberg from Norway and Mikko Myrskylä from Germany are co-leaders of the EU-funded BIOSFER research project, which investigates the causes of low fertility in modern societies. In the context of BIOSFER, TTO has drawn up the EU agreement between the three parties as well as individual collaboration agreements enabling the parties to conduct data research together across national borders.
Moreover, TTO has helped set up agreements with the four clinics in Denmark where clinical data collection takes place. TTO has also helped negotiate a major agreement set-up with the Danish National Biobank at Statens Serum Institut (SSI) concerning the storage of biological samples.
Much of Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen’s research relies on the ‘Better Health in Generations (BSIG)’ birth cohort, which is also anchored under SSI. TTO is therefore regularly negotiating agreements with BSIG on access to data from the cohort.
In total, Cecilia Høst Ramlau-Hansen has run around 80 legal agreements past TTO since 2017, most of them from 2021 onwards.
Read more about collaboration agreements here,