Rapid progress in information and biotechnologies offers the promise of better, personalized health strategies using rich phenotypic, environmental and molecular (omics) profiles of every individual. To capitalize on this great promise, key challenge is to relate these profiles to health and disease while accounting for high diversity in individuals, populations and environments. Both Europe and Canada have long-term investments in population-based prospective cohort studies providing essential longitudinal data. These data must be analysed in unison to reach statistical power, however, presently cohort data repositories are scattered, hard to search and integrate, and data protection and governance rules discourage central pooling. EUCAN-Connect will enable large-scale integrated cohort data analysis for personalized and preventive healthcare across EU and Canada. This will be based on an open, scalable data platform for cohorts, researchers and networks, incorporating FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for optimal reuse of existing data, and building on maturing federated technologies, with sensitive data kept locally and only results being shared and integrated, in line with key ELSI and governance guidelines. Widespread uptake will be promoted via beyond state-of-the-art research in close collaboration with leading cohort networks, focused on early-life origins of cardio-metabolic, developmental, musculoskeletal and respiratory health and disease impacting human life course. To address challenges of sustainability and curation, we will deliver innovative solutions for distributed, low-cost data harvesting and preservation, community curation/harmonization, privacy protection, open source bioinformatics toolbox development, and international governance. EUCAN-Connect platform and collaborations will be coordinated through BBMRI-ERIC (EU) and Maelstrom Research (Canada) to sustain long-term benefits to science and citizens worldwide.

There has never been a greater need for skilled managers and operators of research infrastructure (RI). Europe must develop the workforce that will turn ~50 nascent RIs with sites in different countries into powerhouses of support for major projects comparable to understanding the blueprint of life or discovering new subatomic particles. RItrain will develop a flagship training programme enabling RIs across all domains to gain expertise on governance, organisation, financial and staff management, funding, IP, service provision and outreach in an international context. It will be designed and delivered by experts who have set up and managed RIs from concept to maturity. We will define competencies required by RIs through consultation with their senior managers. The resulting competency framework will underpin a Bologna-compliant degree, the Master in Research Infrastructure Management, with three delivery routes. (1) Professionals working in RIs (or organisations representing them) can dip into the content, focusing on areas where there is most need. (2) Management teams can take the course as an organisation, dividing modules between them to gain a certificate for the RI. This will flag the RI as an organisation that values staff development, improving its attractiveness as an employer. (3) Recent graduates and others wishing to enhance their employability can take a full master’s degree. Course content will include webinars led by senior managers of RIs. A staff-exchange programme will catalyse exchange of best practice and foster cooperation to develop a mobile work force effective across many RIs. By the end of the project we will be delivering a master’s curriculum funded through course fees. Others with an interest in adopting it will be encouraged to do so, providing a means of expanding the programme. Europe’s research community and global collaborators will gain from world-class facilities to support excellent, high-impact research to benefit humankind.

Counteracting high attrition rates in oncology drug development and providing optimal therapeutic management of cancer patients require preclinical models that properly recapitulate the complexity and diversity of human tumours. Patient-derived tumour xenografts (PDXs), established by transplanting tumour fragments into immunodeficient mice, are being widely embraced by the scientific community as preclinical tools for target and biomarker discovery. The overall goal of EDIReX is to establish a cutting-edge European infrastructure offering Trans-national Access (TA) of PDX resources to academic and industrial cancer researchers, including the distribution of cryopreserved samples to third parties, the structured biobanking of user-developed models, and the performance of efficacy studies. To ensure interoperability in services, TA initiatives will be backed by Networking Activities (NAs); these will be mainly centred around the establishment of standard procedures for PDX quality control, long-term storage and therapeutic mouse trials. NAs will also entail the adoption of shared ethics parameters for animal experimentation, the wide dissemination of services and project results, and the design of plans to ensure sustainability of the infrastructure. User outreach will be maximised by Joint Research Activities through a three-pronged approach: i) the implementation of a public Data Portal for efficient and user-friendly query and visualisation of clinical, molecular and pharmacological annotation of the models; ii) a cross-validation mouse trial to harmonise inter-laboratory procedures, thus improving the quality and reliability of service provision; and iii) the development of exploratory, more advanced PDX-based preclinical platforms, such as orthotopic and humanised models and in vitro PDX-derived cells. Capitalising on all these assets, EDIReX will contribute to structuring the European Research Area and global cooperation of research infrastructures.

The ISIDORe consortium, made of the capacities of European ESFRI infrastructures and coordinated networks, proposes to assemble the largest and most diverse research and service providing instrument to study infectious diseases in Europe, from structural biology to clinical trials. Giving scientists access to the whole extent of our state of the art facilities, cutting edge services, advanced equipment and expertise, in an integrated way and with a common goal, will enable or accelerate the generation of new knowledge and intervention tools to ultimately help control SARS CoV 2 in particular, and epidemic prone pathogens in general, while avoiding fragmentation and duplication among European initiatives. Such a global and interdisciplinary approach is meant to allow the implementation of user projects that are larger, more ambitious and more impactful than the EU supported transnational activities that the consortium is used to run. Our proposition is ambitious but achievable in a timely fashion due to the relevance and previous experience of the partners that we have gathered and that have complementary fields of expertise, which addresses the need for an interdisciplinary effort. Leveraging all these existing strengths to develop synergies will create an additional value and enhance Europe capacity for controlling emerging or re emerging and epidemic infectious diseases, starting with the COVID 19 pandemic. Such a global and coordinated approach is consistent with the recommendations of the One Health concept and necessary to make significant contributions to solving complex societal problems like epidemics and pandemics.

Data and AI are the fuel of scientific discoveries, and Research Infrastructures (RIs) are at the forefront of this process, generating massive and increasingly more complex datasets. However, the growing size, diversity, and velocity of research data and software demand large-scale infrastructures and technical expertise from those on the user side. RI-SCALE will address this challenge by delivering Data Exploitation Platforms (DEPs). These scalable environments will co-host scientific data with preconfigured AI frameworks and models on powerful compute resources and unlock full data and AI potential for scientific users, RI operators and industry. RI-SCALE will design and develop the DEP technology with four RIs: ENES, EISCAT, BBMRI and Euro-BioImaging. DEP instances will be deployed for environmental and life sciences, validating the technology through 8 scientific and 4 technical use cases. These will run on national e-infrastructures from the EGI Federation and (pre)exascale machines from EuroHPC. RI-SCALE will collaborate with Destination Earth, EUCAIM cancer images data space, Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, EOSC and Gaia-X to ensure interoperability within the broader landscape. The project will also facilitate industry and university collaborations, provide training and consultancy events to increase the uptake of AI technologies by additional RIs and explore sustainable DEP operation models for RI communities.