This project is no longer active and this site is provided for reference only. Please contact [email protected] for enquiries about the project.

About the project

Stronger through common links

BioMedBridges will form a cluster of the emerging biomedical sciences research infrastructures (BMS RIs) and construct the data and service bridges needed to connect  them.

  • The BMS RIs are on the roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).
  • The missions of the BMS RIs stretch from structural biology of specific biomolecules to clinical trials on thousands of human patients.
  • Most serve a specific part of the vast biological and medical research community, estimated to be at least two million scientists in Europe across more than 1000 institutions from more than 36 ESFRI Member States and Associated Countries.
  • Each of them brings together its own large community of users to build a coordinated infrastructure. This process has already had a major impact on coordination of national infrastructures within each member state.
  • Essentially all BMS RIs are distributed infrastructures, with nodes in many European member states.
  • All BMS RIs will support world class biological and medical research and further our understanding of biological processes.  The information they will generate will advance the state of the art and will contribute to our growing understanding of biological processes.
Bringing BMS RIs together  

More information about the project structure

 Providing the technology

 

What will BioMedBridges contribute?

Each infrastructure individually has a major need for a ‘local’ data e-infrastructure, allowing their information and knowledge to be accessible for their own research community - this has been an essential part of their individual planning processes.  Therefore, most of these infrastructures have their own databases and computational tools, developed and used by their researchers.

However, just as the parts of a body contribute to the whole, so these infrastructures individually only provide part of the answer to understanding biology. Their output and the knowledge they generate must be integrated to see the whole picture. Our understanding of biology in recent years has highlighted the need to consider ‘the system’ as a whole rather than as separate compartments. Systems biology (and the emerging systems medicine) emphasizes that it is vital that all the information generated by these infrastructures (and indeed across national laboratories throughout Europe) is properly curated and archived (where appropriate) and made accessible to all researchers in academia and industry, being always mindful of the appropriate access and security protocols. 

BioMedBridges will construct the necessary bridges between the separate infrastructures and the data and services they offer. Building any bridge requires firm foundations at both ends. Therefore, this project will build on existing infrastructures while adding enormous value by integrating the whole.