The social and economic challenges of ageing populations and chronic disease can only be met by translation of biomedical discoveries to new, innovative and cost effective treatments. The ESFRI Biological and Medical Research Infrastructures (BMS RI) underpin every step in this process; effectively joining scientific capabilities and shared services will transform the understanding of biological mechanisms and accelerate its translation into medical care. Biological and medical research that addresses the grand challenges of health and ageing span a broad range of scientific disciplines and user communities. The BMS RIs play a central, facilitating role in this groundbreaking research: inter-disciplinary biomedical and translational research requires resources from multiple research infrastructures such as biobank samples, and resources from multiple research infrastructures such as biobank samples, imaging facilities, molecular screening centres or animal models. Through a user-led approach CORBEL will develop the tools, services and data management required by cutting-edge European research projects: collectively the BMS RIs will establish a sustained foundation of collaborative scientific services for biomedical research in Europe and embed the combined infrastructure capabilities into the scientific workflow of advanced users. Furthermore CORBEL will enable the BMS RIs to support users throughout the execution of a scientific project: from planning and grant applications through to the long-term sustainable management and exploitation of research data. By harmonising user access, unifying data management, creating common ethical and legal services, and offering joint innovation support CORBEL will establish and support a new model for biological and medical research in Europe. The BMS RI joint platform will visibly reduce redundancy and simplify project management and transform the ability of users to deliver advanced, cross-disciplinary research.

The RAFIKI consortium will support capacity building for early drug discovery in Africa with a focus on infectious diseases (e.g., malaria, tuberculosis). Sub-Saharan Africa is disproportionately burdened by such diseases yet lacks a critical mass of appropriately skilled scientists and access to general infrastructure, enabling technology platforms and expertise for drug discovery research. RAFIKI will leverage existing collaborations within the consortium to build the knowledge and technical capacities of research institutions across Africa. RAFIKI will establish regional training hubs in South, East and West Africa to support local capacity/skillset building for early-/mid-career researchers via bidirectional scientific training visits, mentorships, regional in-person workshops and online training courses. To establish the requisite infrastructure for future drug discovery R&I, knowledge and procedures will be shared for compound library curation at partner institutions (i.e., workflows, open database creation, library sharing capabilities), and data management capacities will be bolstered using the Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) Vault. To secure funding beyond the project lifetime, the consortium will liaise with relevant industrial actors and potential public/private funders.

European and global research infrastructures (RIs) provide facilities and resources to support excellence and innovation, delivering socio-economic value by raising skills, advancing knowledge and technology and its exploitation, and driving new development and construction. RIs closely engage with their specialist communities but RI sustainability in the long term requires engagement with civil communities and stakeholders where an understanding of the significance and the socio-economic benefits of the services delivered underpins financial and strategic support. RI-VIS will increase the visibility of European RIs to broader scientific communities, industry and strategic partners in third countries. The RI-VIS consortium has main membership from the life sciences RIs where there is urgent need to improve outreach and strategic partnerships. Partner RIs in other thematic groups ensure that outcomes are relevant to all. A major advantage of this consortium is first hand knowledge of RI services and operating processes and their user communities. RI-VIS will target communities and stakeholders with current and precise information and match them with RIs to facilitate i) the development of new collaborations, ii) user accessibility, iii) collaborative and innovative actions, iv) funding opportunities, v) knowledge transfer and vi) training opportunities. RI-VIS will make it easier for new entrants to find out how RIs are organized and funded, where and how to access RI services and where data is available. The communication framework will include several digital platforms to achieve broad reach and generate a communication toolkit to help others benefit from the experiences gained. RI-VIS will broker engagement of RIs with various stakeholder groups using events and thematic workshops. A collaboration toolkit will identify best engagement strategies to bring new agreements to fruition. RI-VIS will mentor a selection of partnerships to broker cooperation agreements.

EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS), the European Research Infrastructure of Open Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology, builds a distributed organization of national screening and chemistry facilities, a common database, and a central headquarter that manages the joint compound collection and coordinates project flow and training. It provides world-class services to academia and industry in the fields of small molecule screening and medicinal chemistry. EU-OS developed its concept and business plan during the preparatory phase and has received information on the Commission Implementing Decision on setting up the EU-OS European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EU-OS-ERIC) in March 2018. In 2018, EU-OS will start its ERIC operations with seven founding members and one observer. EU-OS will promote the rich chemical knowledge of Europe and enabling systematic studies of the bioactivities of a larger collection of compounds leading to ground-breaking insights into cellular and organismal metabolic or signalling pathways. After careful consideration of IPR from all stakeholders involved, all results will eventually become available to the public. EU-OS will thereby also play an increasingly important role in facilitating the drug discovery process in Europe. In addition, it also has a great potential for innovative development of biomarkers and other diagnostics. By carefully considering the recommendations of the Long-term Sustainability Action Plan of the EC and ESFRI, EU-OS will utilize EU-OS-DRIVE to specifically promote measures for i) widening awareness of academia and industry for its services and data, ii) growing capacity and competence in its field across Europe, and iii) completing the management processes needed for a large distributed infrastructure. EU-OS-DRIVE will further help the EU-OS-ERIC to deliver its added-value via constant re-use of generated data and tools by users across the globe and to support the competitiveness of European life science industries.

MARBLES will use a novel and systematic approach to access and exploit marine microbial biodiversity for sustainable bioprospecting to discover microbial consortia and bioactive molecules for application in aqua- and agriculture and in the clinic. MARBLES' ecology-based bioprospecting strategy will focuses on unique host-microbe interactions in marine environments, including marine sponges, microalgae and fish, which rely on their microbiomes and microbial natural products for disease resistance. Partners’ existing microbial collections and new ones generated during MARBLES will be harnessed for the discovery of novel natural products and synthetic microbial communities. For this, MARBLES will use a systems-wide genomics approach to uncover the bioactive agents in disease-suppressive microbiomes. Also, MARBLES will explore host- and microbe-derived chemicals that elicit production of bioactive compounds, as elicitors to revitalise drug screening. The deliverables will be microbes and consortia and bioactive natural products, their derivatives and elicitors, which can be harnessed to fight infectious diseases in the agrochemical and aquaculture industries and in healthcare. Besides highly innovative, the approaches will be cost-effective and will offer advantages from both environmental and health perspectives in comparison to existing alternatives. The sustainable production of bioprotectants will increase the effectiveness of fish production - reducing the pressure on harvesting wild fish - and aid the transition of the crop agriculture sector towards bio-based and circular solutions. MARBLES will work closely together with a panel of SMEs and large companies from the EU aquaculture, crop protection biotechnology and health sectors. MARBLES fully complies with the Nagoya and Cartagena Protocols, and aims to make major contributions to the UN sustainable development goals, SDG 2, 3, 12, 13 and 14, as well as to current UN processes (BBNJ, DSI, SynBio)