Expediting scientific discovery in Europe

Professor Janet Thornton, Director of the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, coordinates ELIXIR, an ESFRI Research Infrastructure of global significance that will protect Europe’s treasure-trove of biological information. Here, she talks about how ELIXIR will allow competition and innovation to flourish in Europe’s health sector.

Over the past decade European funding agencies have invested heavily in research, often motivated by concerns about healthcare for an ageing population and the security of our food supply. All of these funders, and the people they represent, are eager to see that maximum value is being extracted from this research, and that the data it produces is safeguarded well into the future.
But as increasingly high-throughput technologies such as DNA sequencing are changing the face of research, this is no simple task. What used to take years of painstaking and expensive work now takes minutes, produces a massive amount of data and costs relatively little. We are already struggling to cope with this flood of data, but expect these technologies to be thousands of times more productive in the coming decade.
The science of managing, storing, retrieving and analysing biological data – called bioinformatics – makes major research projects possible. For instance, data from the 1000 Genomes Project, which is looking at the genetic patterns of thousands of individuals, is massive and needs to be managed very carefully. Data from this project were made public at the earliest opportunity, and have already been used in medical studies linking genetic variation and cancer.
Databases that contain this kind of information are powerful resources for drug discovery, or for developing tools that will help doctors anticipate a person’s response to a drug, for example. They expedite discovery by making huge amounts of information publicly available, so that researchers in many different disciplines can use it in novel ways.
But where and how will we store all this data, and for how long? How will we ensure that it can be retrieved and used in ways that benefit humankind? So far, the challenge of handling Europe’s core biological data resources has been met mostly by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK. But the task is simply too large and complex to be handled by any single organisation or nation. Unless we can distribute the management of all this data, we will not be able to cope and valuable work will be lost.
ELIXIR is working to unite Europe’s many life science data providers, which are technologically and organisationally diverse. This is not a simple matter – we are working to create robust and sustainably funded structures for handling data and tools we well as for coordinating training on these diverse and evolving resources. After all, what would be the point of all these resources if only a few people know how to use them?
The purpose of ELIXIR is to empower researchers in academia and industry to solve some of society’s most pressing problems by providing them with seamless access to biological information on an unprecedented scale. This will make it simpler for people with very different perspectives to draw on several powerful resources at once to answer complex questions.
ELIXIR is an ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) project that is considered to be of global significance because the data belong to everyone. Many ELIXIR members play key roles in other infrastructure projects. The EU-funded BioMedBridges project, which has recently been approved, formalises this involvement so that progress in one project can benefit all the others. Funding available via the European Commission and national or regional agencies is expected to be very tight in the coming years, regardless of the potential for large-scale initiatives like ELIXIR to stimulate innovation and provide skilled jobs. But looking at the larger funding picture, ELIXIR offers the most economic approach to managing and protecting the data which we have already paid to generate, and to making it accessible – and therefore exploitable – by all.
Europe’s governments are ultimately being asked to decide whether we can afford not to implement ELIXIR. For without it, it will not be possible to develop a European bio-economy. This has serious implications for Europe’s future economic prosperity, and certainly impacts the competitiveness of our pharmaceutical and health sectors. In reality, the costs of funding ELIXIR are insignificant when compared to the costs of repeating research. A sound biological data infrastructure is probably the best insurance policy any government or agency can make to secure its investments in research.
ELIXIR is in its preparatory phase. So far, 54 organisations in 23 nations have put forward proposals to participate and several countries – Denmark, Finland, Spain, Sweden and the UK – have committed funding. This summer, a Memorandum of Understanding will be signed by EMBL and candidate partner countries. In 2013, ELIXIR will start to be implemented in research centres throughout Europe. But it is imperative that national and regional funders understand the importance of biological data to Europe’s future prosperity.
Bioinformatics allows researchers throughout the world, working in many disciplines, to use the flood of data pouring out of high-throughput experiments in ways that benefit society. With ELIXIR, we are securing the commitment of our many nations to protecting and managing this vast wealth of biological data. This will keep innovation and competition alive in Europe, and will pave the way for discoveries that will help us tackle some of our most serious challenges.

Published: Monday, 9th May 2011