Help researchers find cures and treatments for diseases.
BioLinked™ acts as a bridge to connect blood donors who are already interested in saving lives with researchers by creating a registry of people who are willing to take part in medical research studies.
Getting started is easy!
- Sign up online and select Rock River Valley Blood Center as your referring blood center.
- Create a medical history profile.
Researchers will contact us if you fit a medical marker profile and we will contact you to participate.
It is an electronic roster of people willing to help researchers find cures and treatments. You submit a confidential, self-managed profile of only the medical and social information you are willing to offer. This allows BioLinked™ to then search anonymously to find people who meet research needs.
Your encrypted data is stored in a private, secure database that is used to locate people with specific medical, family, and social backgrounds that match up with research opportunities.
Only you and restricted, authorized staff members at our blood center can see your questionnaire answers. Your information will never be shared with anyone else unless you consent in writing.
Many scientists contact our blood center for help with clinical trials and basic research. The researchers are often looking for people with very specific conditions or symptoms. When a researcher contacts the blood center, we will search the BioLinked™ database to see if anyone matches the need. If an individual is a fit, we will contact that person and ask if they are interested in participating.
Absolutely not! If your history matches a researcher’s need, one of our medical staff will contact you. If you have any interest in participating, we will explain what the researcher needs and how that may affect you. The choice to move forward is completely yours. Unless you agree, the researcher will never know your identity.
Possibly, but each research project is different. Some, but not all, do have budgets for paying participants.
To expand our lifesaving mission! There are more than 16,000 clinical studies occurring at any time in the United States. These studies could provide cures or treatments for diseases that affect our friends and neighbors. This progress is often delayed many years because scientists cannot locate people to participate in their research. By helping researchers locate willing people with specific conditions, we can do our part in bringing new medicines to people as soon as possible.