The INFRAFRONTIER-EMMA group at IBBC has been selected to participate in EOSC-Life (eosc-life.eu/) and PATHBIO (pathbio.org/), two new leading network projects, specifically supported by the European Commission and aimed at fundamentally advancing biomedical data integration and learning/training in precision pathobiology for disease models, respectively.
The INFRAFRONTIER-EMMA staff members actively participate in the EOSC-Life and PATHBIO activities, workgroups and meetings (eosc-life.eu/news-events/; pathbio.org/event_201903_barcelona.php), further promoting on-going collaborations and developing novel opportunities for common research projects with fellow partners from all major European biomedical research Institutions.
EOSC-Life: European Open Life Science Cloud – Providing an open collaborative space for digital biology in Europe
(eosc-life.eu/about/partners/)
European Union Horizon2020 Programme – Infrastructures for European Open
Science Cloud Grant n. 824087, 2019-2023
EOSC-Life brings together the 13 Biological and Medical Infrastructure Consortia of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures- (ESFRI-BMS RIs) and their partners to create an open collaboratory for digital biology. CNR participates in this highest-profile initiative, with the selected groups of INFRAFRONTIER-EMMA RI at CNR-IBBC, Monterotondo and ELIXIR RI at CNR-IBIOM, Bari.
EOSC-Life is BMS RIs’ joint response to the challenge of analysing and reusing the prodigious amounts of data produced by advanced European research in life sciences. Managing and integrating this data is beyond the capabilities of most individual end-users and Institutions. By publishing data and tools in a Europe-wide cloud, EOSC-Life aims at bringing the capabilities of big science projects to the wider research community.
EOSC-Life establishes a novel access model for BMS RIs, allowing scientists to directly identify and retrieve findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data and tools, in a common cloud environment available throughout the European Research Area and world-wide.
EOSC-Life will implement workflows that cross disciplines and RIs’ boundaries and address the needs of advanced interdisciplinary science. Through open hackathons and bring-your-own-data events EOSC-Life will be co-created with its user communities, providing a blueprint for how European Open Cloud initiatives can foster and support excellent data-driven scientific research.
EOSC-Life will implement specific authorisation and authentication infrastructures for federated and secure transnational user access and validation. Data policies needed for human research under the General Data Protection Regulation will be also addressed. Furthermore, interoperable provenance information will describe history of samples and data to ensure reproducibility and adherence to regulatory requirements.
The ultimate goal of the EOSC-Life project is to make sure that life scientists can find, access and integrate their needed data for analysis and reuse in academic and industrial research.
EOSC-Life will thus transform European life-science by providing an open, continent-scale, collaborative and interdisciplinary environment for biological and medical data science.
PATHBIO: Precision PathoBiology for Disease Models (pathbio.org/about.php)
European Union Erasmus+ Programme – Knowledge Alliance Grant n. 600803,
2019-2022
The PATHBIO project and its engaged partners are ideally positioned to develop highest level educational programs for Mouse Precision Pathobiology at pan-European level.
- PATHBIO includes several leading Universities (UAB, UCAM, UCPH, FMV-UniLisboa, UniNA and USFD) in the field.
- Five major European mouse clinics (CERBM-ICS Strasbourg, MRC Harwell, HMGU Munich, IMG Prague and CNR Monterotondo) equipped with integrated facilities for production and characterization of genetically engineered mouse models are also leading partners of PATHBIO. These mouse clinics are developing and using state-of-the-art mouse imaging technologies and have long-standing expertise in pathology phenotyping, along with data-capture, annotation, and bioinformatic analysis capabilities to interpret the resulting datasets.
- Three of the largest world-wide producers and suppliers of mouse models (Charles River, The Jackson Laboratory and The Centre for Phenogenomics) and a leading company in the field of preclinical imaging (FujiFilm VisualSonics) also participates in PATHBIO.
- FELASA and ICLAS are the leading European and global animal science associations and actively cooperate with the PATHBIO Consortium, representing common interests in all aspects of laboratory animal science in Europe and beyond.
- The interaction with the major Asian, Australian, South American and African phenogenomics centers, as associate partners, provides PATHBIO with a unique and preeminent global position to define fundamental skill’s sets and required knowledge commons to produce and validate reliable mouse models of human diseases.
- The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) has also specifically recognized and endorsed the PATHBIO project.