Each member state of ELIXIR establishes a ‘Node’. A Node is a network of organisations that work within a member state. Each Node has a lead organisation that coordinates the local ELIXIR activities. ELIXIR Finland is hosted at CSC – IT Center for Science. CSC operates resources and services that are part of ELIXIR, like pan-European ELIXIR identity and access infrastructure. ELIXIR-FI services are developed with the European e-Infrastructure (e.g. EuroHPC/LUMI, GAIA-X, EOSC, GEANT, NeIC).
The ELIXIR node in Finland increases capabilities to support research on health & life sciences data. We connect ELIXIR to biobank data management and training in Finland, and link the national bioinformatics network (https://www.biocenter.fi/). The mission of Finnish Biobank Cooperative –FINBB is to enhance the competitiveness of Finnish health and biomedical research by providing researchers a centralized access to collections and services of the Finnish biobanks and their background organizations. ELIXIR Finland has actively collaborated since 2012 with the National institute of health and welfare (THL) and Univ. of Helsinki/Institute for Molecular Medicine (FIMM) operating BBMRI and EATRIS Finland nodes.
The website of science and researchers, Fingenious.fi, has been chosen by STM and THL as Finland’s common brand to increase biomedical research in our country, especially in research activities under Act on Secondary Use of Health and Social Data.
Node seeks to form a legal link accepted by the European Commission to all Finnish higher education institutes and research organisations. CSC has formed a general framework agreement between all these organisations.
ELIXIR-Finland co-lead the ELIXIR Compute Platform, and the Global Alliance for Genomics Health (GA4GH), Data Use and Researcher Identities workstream, as well as technical infrastructure for the European 1+ Million Genomes initiative. The research service development at CSC in these contexts contributes to the ELIXIR-FI Node positioning and strategy. One of the expected outcomes is leadership in the upcoming implementation of European Health Data Space (EHDS), such as Genomics Data Space, to ensure Finnish data infrastructure will be interoperable with the European data spaces. In addition, CSC participates in large public-private partnerships like the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI2) BIGPICTURE project (2021-27) that is building a large-scale digital pathology image repository.
Examples of ELIXIR Finland funders, collaborators and projects:
ELIXIR is partly funded by the European Commission