Precision medicine is entering a new digital era.

The availability of structured clinical datasets at the national level is a key catalyst for biomedical research, education, and innovation in industry. Programs that enable the standardized generation and sharing of such data are essential for the development, testing, and validation of medical information technologies and self-learning systems that will shape future clinical practice. 

SDPI provides Swiss research with a critical resource to remain at the forefront of biomedical science in the digital age. 

The Swiss Digital Pathology Initiative (SDPI) is being established as a national research infrastructure jointly developed by the universities of Zurich, Basel, Bern, Lausanne, and Geneva. Committed to the Swiss National Strategy for Open Research Data, SDPI will provide researchers across Switzerland with access to digital pathology images of neoplastic and non-neoplastic diseases derived from human samples at university pathology departments (UZH, UniBas, UniBe, UniGe, UniL) and from animal models at the Vetsuisse Faculties in Zurich and Bern.
Through a centralized registry, SDPI will make it possible to assemble large, internationally competitive cohorts for biomedical research and to jointly leverage the latest technologies in digital data analysis.

Unlike in other leading research and education hubs (UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, USA), such an infrastructure is not yet available in Switzerland. However, SDPI benefits from a unique structural advantage: the established standards and IT network of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN–BioMedIT). Accordingly, the SDPI research infrastructure is designed in full compatibility with SPHN data standards and will make use of the existing high-performance computing and storage resources of the BioMedIT services.

Data generation at partner institutions will follow the FAIR data management principles, the Swiss Human Research Act, and all relevant legal and ethical frameworks. The feasibility and scientific impact of such a resource are demonstrated by the international success of comparable infrastructures.
With SDPI, a national network of Switzerland’s cantonal universities is being created that will allow to fully realize the potential of digital pathology for research and innovation in biomedicine.