Beacon4Biobanks for Level 2 onboarding

Beacon4Biobanks is a service that implements the EJP-RD VP API specs to query for /individuals and /biosamples endpoints for a biobank. It can be adopted by biobanks that are part of the Sample Locator, one of the solutions provided to participate in the BBMRI Federated Platform. The following figure shows a schema of how Beacon4Biobanks is integrated with the other services.

The Sample Locator provides the biobanks with a tool called Bridghead, which stores data about biosamples and donors in an HL7 FHIR Store. The Beacon4Biobanks service is an additional service that performs the Beacon queries, as required by the specification, against the FHIR Store of the Bridgehead, and returns the count of individuals or biosamples. Since the API relies on the Sample Locator’s Bridgehead, a biobank that has already joined it can be onboarded in the EJP-RD VP by adding the Beacon4Biobank service to its stack. If a biobank is not in the BBMRI Sample Locator, it can first join the Sample Locator and then be easily onboarded in the EJP-RD VP.