Vivli Europe has moved to its own domain at vivli.eu!
The move reflects Vivli Europe’s continued growth as an independent European non-profit supporting the responsible secondary use of health data across borders. As the European Health Data Space (EHDS) takes shape, Vivli Europe works with industry and academic health data holders to prepare for it and put it into practice.
Visit vivli.eu to learn more.
Are you a researcher using data accessed through Vivli for secondary research?
The Vivli Researcher Community Group is now open on LinkedIn!
Created in response to requests from researchers for a space to connect with peers, the online group is a place to share work, meet others across institutions and disciplines, and hear about upcoming events and other opportunities from Vivli.
Membership is by request and open to researchers with an active Vivli account. To join, visit the Vivli Researcher Community Group on LinkedIn and select Request to join. Our team will review your request.
Version 4.1 of the Vivli platform was released October 31, 2026 and is now available to users.
Release 4.1 includes the following highlights:
All Vivli resources and how to guides have been updated to reflect the latest release.
Note: For the best experience of the Vivli platform and to ensure you are accessing the latest version, please clear your cache in your preferred browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Edge are all supported). If you experience any problems after clearing your cache, please contact us at support@vivli.org.
“We are delighted to welcome the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership (GARDP) as a member of Vivli and Vivli’s AMR Register” shared Rebecca Li, Vivli CEO. “GARDP’s leadership in addressing antimicrobial resistance makes its commitment to data sharing especially significant. We look forward to working together to broaden access to valuable clinical research data and to support the evidence needed to develop effective treatments for drug-resistant infections.”
“Antimicrobial resistance is a global challenge that demands collaboration and transparency across the research ecosystem,” said Justin Green, Medical Director at GARDP. “Through our participation in Vivli and the AMR Register, GARDP is reinforcing its commitment to responsible data sharing and to advancing the science needed to deliver new treatment options for drug-resistant infections. We hope the data will support researchers worldwide and help ensure that effective treatments reach the people who need them most.”
GARDP is a not-for-profit global health organization driven to protect people from the rise and spread of drug-resistant infections, one of the biggest threats to us all. Its public-private partnership model integrates affordability, appropriate use, and sustainable access throughout the development process, with a particular focus on high-burden countries and vulnerable populations, including newborns.
By joining Vivli and participating in Vivli’s AMR Register, GARDP will help expand access to clinical research data and strengthen the global evidence base for addressing antimicrobial resistance.
For more information about the conditions for accessing GARDP data, please visit their member page. To learn more about membership in Vivli, visit vivli.org/members/become-a-member/ .
Vivli is pleased to announce the 2026 cohort of Global Ambassadors, a group of researchers using shared clinical research data to answer important scientific questions and champion the value of data reuse within their research communities. The Global Ambassador Program supports researchers in extending the reach and impact of work emerging from secondary analyses. Ambassadors share their findings and perspectives through conferences, publications, professional networks, and other forums, contributing to broader conversations about responsible data sharing and reuse. “We are excited to welcome this new group of Ambassadors and support them in sharing both their research and their experiences working with shared data,” said Rebecca Li, Vivli CEO. “Researchers who put existing data to new use are some of the strongest advocates for data sharing because they can show firsthand the new questions, findings, and collaborations that access can make possible.”
The 2026 cohort builds on the work of Vivli’s inaugural Ambassadors, who used data accessed through Vivli to advance research across cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and clinical research methodology. Over the course of the year, the 2025 Ambassadors published new findings, presented their work to research communities around the world, pursued new analyses, and helped broaden the conversation around responsible data sharing and reuse. We congratulate this year’s Ambassadors on their selection and look forward to following their work over the coming year.
We are proud to announce the launch of the Alzheimer’s Trials Data Discovery Challenge — a $75,000 research competition powered by the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and Vivli, and supported by Alzheimer’s Research UK.
The challenge is built around a fully harmonized control-arm dataset drawn from 11 Alzheimer’s trials across five pharmaceutical sponsors: AstraZeneca, Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Roche, and Takeda. It brings together 7,089 placebo-arm participants and more than 20 years of data — never before analyzed at this scale.
Three research tracks address questions newly answerable at this scale: sex differences in Alzheimer’s disease, rates of progression, and subtyping and heterogeneity. Up to 24 teams will participate, with $25,000 awarded to the first-place team in each track. Winning teams will also have the opportunity to publish findings in a high-impact journal and present at a major Alzheimer’s conference.
All analysis takes place within Vivli’s secure, cloud-based research environment. Teams must include a PI sponsor and a statistician at minimum.
The first letter of intent deadline is September 1, 2026. Winners will be announced in Spring 2027.
Date/Time: August 19, 2026 (9:00 AM ET | 3:00 PM CET)
Presenters: Jennifer O’Callaghan, Executive Director of Vivli Europe
The EU’s European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation establishes a framework for how health data can be accessed and reused to drive research, innovation, and policy. While the regulation entered into force in March 2025, its specific rules regarding the secondary use of data (SUD) are set to take effect in March 2029. In this session, Jennifer O’Callaghan, Executive Director of Vivli Europe, provides an introduction to the EHDS SUD mandate and its implications for both data holders and data users. She will examine the processes for making health data available for secondary use, highlight areas where the framework is still evolving, and address the key questions remaining as implementation begins.
No prior knowledge of EHDS is required; this session is designed for anyone seeking a clear overview of the EHDS SUD framework and its future trajectory.
Version 4.0 of the Vivli platform was released June 27, 2026 and is now available to users.
Release 4.0 includes several key improvements designed to enhance the user experience and support more secure, connected workflows:
All Vivli resources and how to guides have been updated to reflect the latest release
“We are delighted to have added MFA to the Vivli platform to further enhance our security posture,” said Robert Conklin, Vivli Chief Technology Officer.
Global researchers used shared trial data to advance work in cancer, diabetes, and clinical trial design.
The Vivli Global Ambassador Program brought together a diverse group of researchers selected for their commitment to data transparency and leadership in advancing clinical research around the world. Through their use of shared clinical research data, these Ambassadors help promote responsible data sharing and reuse within their fields. Over the past year, the inaugural cohort has shown how data available through Vivli can be incorporated into active research programs to generate new findings, support scientific exchange, and create new opportunities for collaboration. One of the most important contributions of the program has been visibility. For many researchers, data reuse remains unfamiliar despite growing expectations around data sharing. Ambassadors helped bridge that gap by sharing their experiences at major scientific meetings and academic seminars across four continents, from the European Society for Radiation Oncology meeting in Vienna and the International Congress on Lung Cancer in Barcelona, to the Princess Takamatsu Symposium in Tokyo, the IATDMCT meeting in Singapore, and the Vivli Annual Meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In each setting they discussed both the outcomes of their work and the practical realities of conducting secondary research, walking colleagues through everything from the data application process to study design, and introducing investigators across disciplines to approaches that are increasingly shaping the research landscape. What follows is a closer look at the work of the individual ambassadors.
Chronic low back pain affects one in five adults in the United States and remains one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. REACH, UCSF’s Core Center for Patient-Centric, Mechanistic Phenotyping in Chronic Low Back Pain, is funded through NIH HEAL and embedded within the Back Pain Consortium (BACPAC).
Established in 2019 with nearly $30 million in NIH funding, the Center runs two large observational cohorts with overlapping participant populations: comeBACK, an in-person study of 450 adults phenotyped across four University of California sites, and BACKHOME, a fully remote nationwide e-cohort of roughly 3,000 adults, the largest prospective remote registry of chronic low back pain to date. Between the two cohorts, there are nearly 3,450 participants.
Each cohort, along with the REACH center grant, had to be shared as its own data package, a condition of their federal funding. When NIH HEAL designated Vivli as its recommended repository, Kaitlin Yee, a Research Coordinator at UCSF’s Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, took on the submission process for all three.
“It was definitely a bit overwhelming at first,” Kaitlin said, “just in terms of where to start and exactly what was required of us.”
Each submission required four elements: a protocol, individual participant data (IPD), a data dictionary, and a statistical analysis plan. She started with Vivli’s submission checklist and a HEAL-specific tutorial video, which walked through each step, including how to connect each study’s DOI directly to the NIH HEAL Data Platform, so the data is findable from either direction.
“You can go to the HEAL platform and the DOI for our study is linked,” she said. “I thought that was actually pretty neat.”
Three submissions and dozens of files called for a system. The REACH team established a simple file naming convention that tied each data package to its corresponding publication, keeping the uploads organized across multiple cycles as the volume grew.
Kaitlin worked closely throughout the process with Sarah Sweet, Vivli’s Senior Clinical Research Manager. When a submission needed to be reset mid-upload, it was handled the same day.
“Sarah has been amazing. We’ve been talking back and forth ever since we started. She’s been so responsive. I really don’t think we’d be where we are without her.”
All three studies are now live on Vivli and linked to the HEAL Data Platform, making data from close to 3,450 participants available to researchers worldwide. For a condition that affects one in five adults and has long resisted easy answers, that reach is the payoff: every team that builds on this data gets closer to understanding chronic low back pain and how to treat it.
The datasets shared by the REACH team are available on Vivli. To learn more about sharing your research data, visit https://vivli.org/resources/sharedata/