Finnish Use Cases 2 publications present a range of Finnish biomedical research that has benefited from the resources of the European biomedical infrastructure ELIXIR. Almost 200 research organisations have joined the ELIXIR infrastructure, contributing to the work of more than half a million researchers across Europe. Its Finnish operations are run by the CSC IT – Center for Science.
The publication presents a variety of research that has made use of new bioinformatics methods. The subjects range from drug development, disease mechanisms, cell modelling, microbiomes, utilisation of AI models in diagnostics and personalised drug treatments.
Biomedical research has become data- and computation-intensive. Data analysis calls for more and more sophisticated software and combinations of it. Researchers also need services and resources for data storage and description for further processing.
For example, translational medicine uses basic research in clinical trials, patient samples and disease models to identify disease mechanisms and drug effect targets. The starting point is interdisciplinarity, which helps patients as well as serving research well. The idea behind combining several different data sources is to make more information available. The integration is very much computational, and requires CSC – IT Center for Science’s resources and infrastructures like ELIXIR.
CSC has created services in the infrastructure that are particularly suited for sensitive data.
“The management of research data of humans must be carried out professionally, and this is one of the key objectives of ELIXIR Finland. A combination of high-quality management of sensitive data and high-performance computing creates unprecedented opportunities for Finnish scientists to create models that predict human health, ultimately benefiting all of us – we just need to get the different parts of the ecosystem to work together,” says Tommi Nyrönen, head of the Finnish ELIXIR node.
The construction of the bioscience infrastructure ELIXIR began in Europe in 2013. ELIXIR enables biomedical researchers access to biomedical databases and the computational resources and software to process it, and training in using the system. By April 2024, CSC had 2,386 biomedical and healthcare researchers as its customers.
Download the report here
ELIXIR is partly funded by the European Commission