The very nature of rare diseases means that information is often sparse and highly distributed, and as a result progress in the field is more challenging to conduct. ENSAT-CANCER is an EU-FP7 funded initiative to develop a virtual research environment (VRE) offering a digitally interconnected infrastructure for distributed clinicians specialising in rare adrenal tumours to communicate and collaborate with distributed biomedical research communities. The core of the VRE is a registry that holds vital patient information from specialist centres around Europe, covering different types of adrenal tumours. The VRE also hosts a range of other enabling services including sample barcoding, bio-sample exchange mechanisms, an integrated linkage scheme to other trials and studies, summary statistics and report generation, image hosting – all of which are available in a seamless, security-driven environment. This paper presents the key challenges of this endeavour, the technical solutions that have been developed to address them and reporting the uptake and adoption of the work (currently at 2472 patient records and rising).