About
A European collaboration to handle data in life science
In research projects all over Europe, valuable data are generated but usually remain local and lack a broader use. ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science information, aims to provide access to this wealth of bioinformatics tools and biological data. It creates sustainability through long-term data-storage and databases. ELIXIR offers the possibility to archive, integrate, analyse and exploit the large and heterogeneous data sets of modern life science research beyond the life-time of individual research projects.
ELIXIR Luxembourg, a Luxembourgish node within the European infrastructure
ELIXIR Luxembourg was started at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg. The Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS) is part of the node since its incepetion in 2023. Within ELIXIR, ELIXIR Luxembourg is the Node for Translational Medicine data. It aims to meet with the increasing demand for IT services in biology and medicine, and interface with both the pharmaceutical industry and the clinical healthcare.
The ELIXIR Luxembourg team consists of members of the LCSB Bioinformatics Core and individuals across LNDS. These groups have extensive experience in the field of bioinformatics, computational, structural and systems biology, are involved in several national and international projects on Translational Medicine and has both academic and industrial track-record. The team ihas built up the first international Translational Medicine repositories in the area of Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
Challenges and solutions
Nowadays a major hurdle in the use of biomedical data by a wider research community is the lack of suitable data management systems that collect and integrate all types of data. For example, the numerous terminologies in clinical data are challenging, as well as the separation between data coming from clinic and laboratory. This fragmentation and lack of standards make it difficult to integrate those data into centralised comprehensive repositories and lead to poor interoperability between platforms and projects. Due to the sensitive nature of these data, security and protection requirements, handling access can also be quite complex. ELIXIR Luxembourg is developing different services to provide solutions.
Collaborations
ELIXIR Luxembourg is actively building new national and international collaborations with partners from public and private sectors in Luxembourg and abroad. The Node especially aims to interact with the pharmaceutical industry and the clinical healthcare.
On a national scale, the Node aims to unify the Luxembourgish biomedical IT landscape and implement international data standards. The local biomedical research institutions will be able to use the ELIXIR portal to store and promote the data produced by their cohorts and biological sample collections.
Internationally, ELIXIR Luxembourg intends to become a leading stakeholder in biomedicine, as a secure data hub and a high-performance computing location, hosting data from different European and international consortia. Both the volume and the scope of data available from large international projects will increase over the years, making the Node’s data catalogue of interest to researchers worldwide.
ELIXIR Luxembourg has also forged robust partnerships within the ELIXIR infrastructure, particularly with the Hub and numerous other Nodes, including but not limited to: ELIXIR UK, ELIXIR Denmark, ELIXIR Spain, ELIXIR Czech Republic, and ELIXIR Finland.
