Common infrastructure services supporting biomedical research
CORBEL is an initiative of eleven new biological and medical research infrastructures (BMS RIs), who together will create a platform for harmonised user access to biological and medical technologies, biological samples and data services required by cutting-‐edge biomedical research. CORBEL will boost the efficiency, productivity and impact of European biomedical research.
CORBEL will:
- Establish and improve effective partnerships with user communities. The BMS RIs need to effectively interface with the scientists and projects within large and diverse user communities and science funding bodies. CORBEL will set up simplified access points and joined-‐up service catalogues to support outreach to these users across medicine and biology
- Develop unique solutions to user needs. Each of the participating BMS RIs provides pan-‐European access to specialised research services, instruments, data, samples and facilities that collectively cover life-‐science research, from basic biology to medical translation. CORBEL focuses on the integration of these capabilities into the scientific workflow of advanced users, ensuring that they respond directly to the needs of cutting-‐edge European science.
- Implement a portfolio of seamless, shared research infrastructure services. These services will facilitate user access to data, samples and instrumentation through common access policies and a shared resource portal, and enable users to manage data across infrastructure boundaries. CORBEL will set up a training programme for RI operators and key users to drive the rapid implementation of shared services into the operation.
CORBEL follows BioMedBridges—the first cluster project bringing the biomedical sciences research infrastructures together—and will build on its achievements.
Individually, the services offered by the BMS RIs are critical to their own user communities. Collectively, through CORBEL, they will be transformative across the range of life-‐science disciplines: from generation of knowledge at the bench to patient treatment at the bedside.
CORBEL consortium
The CORBEL consortium brings together eleven major new Biological and Medical Research Infrastructures (BMS RI) in Europe. Their resources include biological data, physical biobank samples, imaging facilities and molecular screening centres:
- ELIXIR— European Distributed Infrastructure for life-‐ science information
- BBMRI— Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructure
- EATRIS— European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine
- ECRIN— European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network
- EU-OPENSCREEN— European Infrastructure of Open Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology
- EMBRC— European Marine Biological Resource Centre
- Euro-BioImaging— European Research Infrastructure for Biological Imaging
- Infrafrontier— Infrastructure for mouse disease models and phenotype data
- Instruct— Integrated Structural Biology unlocking the Secrets of Life
- ISBE— Infrastructure for Systems Biology Europe
- MIRRI— Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure
Facts and figures
• Project start: 1 September 2015
• Funding: €14.5 million from the EU's HORIZON 2020 programme
• Coordinator: ELIXIR (Coordinator) and BBMRI-‐ERIC (Co-‐coordinator)
• Consortium: 35 partners across 9 European countries
For questions regarding CORBEL please contact the project manager Friederike Schmidt‐Tremmel.
