Finland has signed the Consortium Agreement establishing ELIXIR. Finland is the eleventh country to sign the agreement, after the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
The purpose of ELIXIR is to provide a comprehensive, distributed European life sciences infrastructure for biological information, with the aim of collecting, maintaining, storing and integrating material produced and data required by biological and medical research, for instance in the fields of molecular biology or the structure and function of pharmaceuticals.
ELIXIR Finland specialises in developing and providing cloud service resources designed for big data to life science organisations, biobanks and translational medical research. Finland’s participation is coordinated by CSC – IT Centre for Science administered by the Ministry of Education and Culture, in a national consortium (Biomedinfra) that also includes the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). Biocenter Finland is also a collaborator.
This joint research infrastructure provides researchers with centralised access to the genetic data on the Finnish population held by the National Institute for Health and Welfare, the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland and Finland’s hospital districts. The IT services are provided by CSC – IT Center for Science: CSC offers data management services and number-crunching resources, plus rapid data transmission through the Funet network, which CSC administers.
Access to the big biological and biomedical data resources is facilitated by Biomedinfra consortium working with the corresponding European biomedical infrastructures. Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) brings together valuable samples collections and makes them available to researchers.. The European Advanced Translational Research Infrastructure in Medicine (EATRIS) focuses on translating biomedicine findings into clinical applications, and the European Life Science Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR) rationalises the storage and distribution of life science data. ELIXIR Finland has also participated in two ELIXIR pilot projects.
The ELIXIR Finland website is available here. Further information on Finnish ratification is available from the CSC website and the website of the Finnish Ministry.