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In the middle of the 1980s, the Radiation Protection Programme of the European Commission and the European Late Effects Project Group (EULEP) embarked an initiative to collect and collate data covering all available information on European long-term radiobiological animal studies. The Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy, and more recently, the Japanese Late Effects Group have started a similar effort to archive the American and Japanese data. These data combined build the International Radiobiological Archives (IRA) which include, in addition to two human cohort studies, nearly all radiation biology studies with animals carried out between 1960 and 1998 in Europe, the US, and Japan, involving a total of more than 300,000 animals. ERA alone includes 122 studies from 19 laboratories.
The history of the archives has been described by the driving person behind all the activities in archiving historical data, Dr. Georg Gerber, as follows: "The European Radiobiology Archives (ERA) in co-operation with the US National Radiobiology Archives (NRA) and the Japanese Radiobiology Archives (JRA) collect information from past long-term animal studies as well as from some human data suitable for comparison with animal studies. The animal studies have been concerned with late effects in a wide range of species exposed either to external radiation or to intakes of radionuclides. The studies started in the early and mid-1950s and rapidly expanded in many laboratories in North America and Europe through the 1960s and 1970s. While the work continued through the 1980s and 1990s, with new studies still starting in Japan, it was at a reduced level and today very few long-term studies are being carried out anywhere in the world. Important information on health effects has also been obtained from epidemiological studies on people exposed to internal emitters, although even here the number of studies is falling. Although, the overall results of these individual studies have largely been published, all details of the studies and of the survival and pathology of individual animals needed for further statistics and meta-analyses are not available in the literature. Many of these data are being lost as scientists who carried out the work are leaving and laboratories are turning towards other fields. The European Commission with the European Late Effect Project Group (EULEP) as well as US and Japanese authorities have, therefore, collected all data still available in a compatible form in centralised databases so that they are available for future study. Such data are not only useful for a better assessment of risks owing to an exposure to radiation and radionuclides but can also yield valuable information on topics such as ageing and carcinogenesis. These databases must be compatible among each other so that they allow comparing different studies and must be user friendly so that they allow the search for information. Therefore, a close co-operation between the three groups responsible for the databases - ERA, NRA and JRA - is maintained." (Gerber et al., The European Radiobiology Archives (ERA) - content, structure and use illustrated by an example; Radiation Protection Dosimetry (2006), Vol. 118, No. 1, pp. 70-77)
Based on the work conducted so far, ERA-PRO's aim is to update, expand and promote the existing database.
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