Projects
ELIXIR-LU is currently involved in the following projects:
FAIRplus
The volume and complexity of life science data being produced by research is growing exponentially. Unfortunately, it is often inaccessible, annotated inconsistently, and difficult to share because of the proprietary formats, the lack of metadata or of a proper licence. The FAIRplus project aims to address these issues by developing guidelines and tools to make life science data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). It will increase the discovery, accessibility and reusability of data from selected Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) projects, as well as internal data from pharmaceutical industry partners. It will also organise training for data scientists in academia, SMEs and pharmaceutical companies to enable wider adoption of best practises in life science data management.
ELIXIR-LU has been engaging in the development of criteria for identification of data sources for FAIRification, in the development of a FAIR cookbook, as well as in the cataloguing of meta-data from translational medicine projects from both academia and industry.
FAIRplus is funded through the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2), an EU public-private partnership, and is supported by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). The project is coordinated by the ELIXIR Hub and runs for 42 months (January 2019 - June 2022).
ELIXIR-CONVERGE
ELIXIR-CONVERGE brings together experts from all 23 ELIXIR Nodes to work collaboratively on some of the major challenges in research data management, such as access, provisioning and distribution. The aim is to help standardise life science data management across Europe and to strengthen data management capacity through a comprehensive training programme. The development of a data management toolkit sits at the core of the project, providing researchers with a strategy to manage their data to international standards. This toolkit will help ensure more research data is in the public domain, giving scientists access to more data. Recently, the project has been extended towards supporting the submission and sharing of COVID-19 related data collected in each member states.
Within this project, ELIXIR-LU is involved in building the life-science data management expert network, as well as training and capacity building. ELIXIR-LU is in charge of defining best practise and developing training materials in the common data management toolkit. The Node will also integrate data management tools developed in Luxembourg into the ELIXIR landscape and develop an interface to support national researchers for data submission to well-established data repositories. ELIXIR-LU is involved in the extension related to COVID-19 data as well.
ELIXIR-CONVERGE is funded by the European Commission (H2020) and coordinated by the ELIXIR Hub. It runs for three years (February 2020 - January 2023).
Smart4Health
Smart4Health (S4H) enables citizens to manage and bridge their own health data throughout the EU and beyond, advancing their own health and societal wellbeing. Every citizen of the European Union should be able to access their own health data easily and securely within each member state. Smart4Health aims to realise this vision by developing a prototype application that allows users to collect, manage, share and donate their health-related data throughout the EU. In the S4H approach, citizens will not only own and manage their own electronic health records, they will also engage at all stages through their input in ‘co-creating’ the mobile applications and tools platform that can make this happen.
ELIXIR-LU is leading the effort in enabling citizens to provision their data, after de-identification, to the European research community via ELIXIR-LU’s network and data platform.
Smart4Health is funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and is coordinated by UNINOVA and the Hasso Plattner Institute. It runs for four years.
B1MG
Beyond 1 Million Genomes (B1MG) aims to provide coordination and support to the 1+ Million Genomes Initiative (1+MG), by creating a network of genetic and clinical data across Europe. The 1+MG initiative is a commitment of 23 European countries to give cross-border access to one million sequenced genomes by 2022, to ultimately improve disease prevention, personalised treatment and clinical research. B1MG will go ‘beyond’ the 1+MG Initiative. It will bring together key infrastructures, sequencing projects, member state representatives, and the voices of diverse stakeholders including patients. By doing so, the project will ensure data quality, high exchange standards, secure access protocols and excellent legal guidance, creating long-term means of sharing data beyond 2022.
ELIXIR-LU plays a major role in the project and leads the work package dedicated to the establishment of a legal, ethical and socially acceptable framework for secure sharing of genomics data across Europe. The team will scrutinise and aim to solve ethical and legal challenges related to the cross-border nature of such a broad genomic infrastructure. The initial focus will be on several applications on cancer, rare diseases as well as common and complex disorders. ELIXIR-LU is also contributing to develop a better understanding of the technical challenges involved in building a federated secure cross-border infrastructure in line with the ethical and legal requirements, and for optimal interoperability of clinical and genomics data. Additionally, ELIXIR-LU is involved in developing the best practises and framework to collect and standardise phenotypic data linked to genomics data.
B1MG is an ELIXIR-coordinated project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme. It runs for three years (June 2020 - May 2023).
PerMedCoE
PerMedCoE is the HPC/Exascale Centre of Excellence for Personalised Medicine in Europe aims to provide an efficient and sustainable entry point to the HPC/Exascale-upgraded methodology to translate omics information into actionable molecular disease models. It will optimise codes for cell-level simulations in HPC/Exascale and bridge the gap between organ and molecular simulations, thus contributing to the European Personalised Medicine Roadmap.
ELIXIR-LU and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg are in charge of developing and optimising a cell level simulation software to be ready for pre-exascale. The team also leads the tasks of developing guidelines for data protection and privacy preservation in an exascale HPC environment.
Coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, PerMedCoE runs from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2023. A range of 12 world-class academic and industry partners from across Europe are participating in the CoE.
PERMIT
The PERsonalised MedicIne Trials (PERMIT) project aims to develop and disseminate recommendations for robust and reproducible personalised medicine research. Over the span of two years, PERMIT is performing a detailed mapping of current methodologies applied at every stage of the personalised medicine research pipeline and identifying gaps and key areas for the definition of standards. A series of recommendations will then be published, to help guide stakeholders in their assessment, funding, publication and support of personalised medicine research. The objective is to build consensus on standards that will respond to regulatory expectations, will produce high quality, reproducible and reliable results, and support the conduct of multinational clinical trials across Europe.
The Work Package 4 (WP4) led by Assistant Prof. Enrico Glaab (University of Luxembourg / ELIXIR-LU) aims to develop guidelines to ensure biomedical relevance, robustness, reproducibility, and validity of algorithm-driven patient stratification. WP4 will provide an inventory of artificial intelligence methods for omics-based stratification and validation, assess the various machine learning approaches capable of identifying distinctive patient clusters and examine how common workflows could be optimised.
PERMIT is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and runs until December 2021.
HealthyCloud
The new European project HealthyCloud brings together 19 European research partners, amongst which ELIXIR-LU and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg, to deliver a Strategic Agenda for the implementation of the European Health Research and Innovation Cloud (HRIC), which will be one of the cornerstones of the European Health Data Space (EHDS). The EHDS will be a mean to improve health research and its translation to healthcare at all levels: from public health to personalised medicine, through secondary use of health data. The ultimate goal is to propose the blueprint to create an ecosystem that builds and reinforces the trust of patients and citizens in the use of their health data for research.
ELIXIR-Luxembourg contributes its longstanding expertise on secure and responsible data management to the development of the EHDS. The team works on inclusion of Ethical, Legal and Societal aspects (ELSI) in the design of the future HRIC ecosystem, as well as on the design of the architecture for FAIR-based meta-catalogue of health data.
HealthyCloud is financed by the European Commission and coordinated by the Institute for Health Sciences in Aragon (IACS). It runs from 1 March 2021 to 31 August 2023.
