EMBL and the importance of data collection to tackle world epidemics

Above: EMBL campus near Heidelberg (image courtesy health-life-sciences.de

Future Cities Forum was delighted to take part in EMBL's online discussion event recently looking at the issue of data collection, storage security and sharing to tackle world health and epidemics.

The discussion was led by the Mayor of Heidelberg, Mayor Prof. Dr Eckart Wurzner, Dr Guy Cochrane, Head of the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at EMBL-EBI, and Simon Payne, Director of Lambsquay Consulting and the Head of the Heidelberg Club International's London Chapter.

Dr Cochrane described the breadth of data storage at EMBL's Cambridge centre - the European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL-EBI, why the archive is important and how it helps to tackle health issues and disease around the world. He answered a question from Future Cities Forum's Co-founder Heather Fearfield, on how data sharing could help tackle epidemics such as the Mpox virus. Dr Cochrane explained that encouraging data sharing is important, although some poorer countries feel that when they do share data, at a later date they do not necessarily benefit in return from the vaccines developed in Europe.

With 29 member states, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) has more than 110 independent research groups and service teams covering the spectrum of molecular biology at six sites in Barcelona, Grenoble, Hamburg, Heidelberg, EMBL-EBI Hinxton, and Rome. EMBL Council comprises national representatives of its member states and is EMBL’s governing body. Its Director General is Professor Edith Heard FRS. EMBL pursues five missions in research, services, training, technology transfer and policy development. Its five-year plans are set out in its Scientific Programme. EMBL fosters International Relations across Europe and worldwide, and it has partnerships with comparable institutions.

The EMBL-EBI Industry Programme has been an important and vibrant part of EMBL-EBI since 1996, providing regular contact and interaction with key stakeholders and opinion leaders at major global commercial companies, and informing them of the institute’s future directions.

The programme ─ which includes webinars, quarterly strategy meetings, and expert-level workshops on topics prioritised by members ─ is subscription-based for global companies that make significant use of the data and resources provided by EMBL-EBI as a core part of their R&D. Member companies represent most of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as well as several major agri-food, nutrition and healthcare companies.

The EMBL-EBI Industry Programme serves as an interface between industry-focussed initiatives at EMBL-EBI and organisations such as Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the Pistoia Alliance, and the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) among others.

At EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the aim is to help scientists realise the potential of big data in biology, exploiting complex information to make discoveries that benefit humankind. EMBL-EBI is international, innovative and interdisciplinary, and a champion of open data in the life sciences. It is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental research organisation funded by over 20 member states, prospect and associate member states. It is situated on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, UK, one of the world’s largest concentrations of scientific and technical expertise in genomics, data resources and analysis tools to support life science research. EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) maintains the world’s most comprehensive range of freely available and up-to-date molecular data resources.