Two weeks ago, the board of directors sent its employees a letter which stated that the future of LifeLines is uncertain. Subsidies have run out, and the research programme is unable to run on its own. ‘Together with UMCG, we’re trying to figure out how to secure subsequent funding’, says RUG president Sibrand Poppema, who is on the research programme’s Supervisory Board and was involved in founding the population study.
The board of directors are in talks regarding subsidies with various ministries and provinces. But according to Poppema, they are mainly focusing on the HWS ministry. ‘We feel that the ministry should fund the research. We haven’t given up just yet’, he said during a University Council meeting last week.
Business model
According to Poppema, the board of directors abandoned LifeLines’ business model too soon. The research programme was started in 2006. ’One of the ideas we had was that researchers would use their funding applications to ask for money that could be used to finance the use of the data. That turned out to be easier said than done: these things are generally not subsidised’, Poppema says.
‘The second idea was that companies would be interested in that data. My successors abandoned that idea rather too easily when participants protested’, says Poppema. For privacy reasons, some participants in the study did not like the idea that their data would be sold to companies. Poppema: ‘With that, the business model was abandoned. And in the past four years, not enough new funding has been secured.’
Thanks to the financial support provided by UMCG and the RUG the research data that has been collected over the past decade will not be lost. But whether there will be a third screening in 2019 remains unclear. ‘We don’t have the money for that as yet, so it’s postponed for now. The data will be kept and people can use it. But right now there is no funding for a screening. Almost all of the money went to employing nurses on location’, says Poppema.
LifeLines’ outpatient clinics will close. If the study continues, they will look into new, cheaper technology to collect data.