ELIXIR Finland was officially launched at an event in the Natural History Museum of Helsinki on the 4 May 2015. The event featured keynotes and speakers from life science community and the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland to illustrate how ELIXIR and ELIXIR Finland has developed. Talks were given at the event by Kimmo Koski, Managing Director of CSC - IT Center for Science and Søren Brunak, Head of ELIXIR Denmark and Chair of the ELIXIR Board during the Interim Phase. The event also featured the launch new ePouta Cloud platform by CSC-IT Center for Science.
Finland has actively participated in the scientific, administrative, legal and political preparations and processes of ELIXIR for the past seven years. In 2014, September the Finnish Parliament granted their approval for Finland to legally join ELIXIR through ratifying the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement. The ELIXIR Finland Node, which was officially launched at the event, is part of the CSC-IT Center of Science Ltd. organization. The Node offers computation and storage, authentication, training and support services to biomedical researchers and research groups.
In Finland, the second edition of the Research Infrastructure Roadmap was published a year ago. It includes the understanding of the development needs at the national level as well as the vision on which fields international cooperation are seen as a target. It was only four years ago when the specific funding for research infrastructures was included in the Government budget in Finland. This was an important step in supporting the realization of the involvement in ESFRI projects. The role of FIRI funding is complementary; hence the ownership and dedication of the national research community is important. Access and openness are key principles in the Finnish national infrastructure research strategy.
Tommi Nyronen, Head of Node for ELIXIR Finland. Photo courtesy of Mrs Nina Kaverinen.
“In Finland, we aim to be a leading country in open science and research. By putting emphasis on open science and research we can improve the competitiveness and quality of research as well as its reliability, impact and transparency. Open science and research leads to surprising discoveries and creative insights, fostering wide participation in scientific research and the use of research results for the benefit of society at large. In addition to scientists and research communities, also research infrastructures and research services need to develop to new efficient ways of working together” stated Mrs. Anita Lehikoinen, Permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland.
Biological information is paramount to development in several sectors. Data is already used by top-level researchers to diagnose diseases like cancer at an improved accuracy. In the long run this can lead to better healthcare and reduce human suffering as the treatments and patients can be matched. On the other hand, the logistics chain and optimization of food production will merge, and genomic information will be used to select the healthiest farm animals for breeding. Plant genomics help to create cereals that tolerate dry conditions – which is very important for the capacity to adopt to the global climate change. The potential economic impact of each of these applications is huge.
“However, analysis of the data to create tangible applications out of this data still is a bottleneck. The challenge is beyond the capacity of a single organization, ministry or even a country. Broad and international collaboration is needed, of which ELIXIR is a prime example”, concluded Permanent secretary Lehikoinen.
The higher education and research institutions in Finland are relatively small compared to many European counterparts. Collaboration between specialized national organizations is key to international credibility. Part of the Finnish strategy was to form a consortium between the major national organizations focusing on bio banking, information technology and personalized medicine applications – namely the National Institute for Health and Welfare, CSC-IT Center for Science and the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine of the University of Helsinki.
This "Biomedinfra" consortium was included at the national research infrastructure roadmap in 2009 followed by funding decision by the Academy of Finland. The Finnish integrated approach to biomedical information infrastructures has also drawn some positive international attention; similar approaches are now driven in countries like the Netherlands and Estonia.
Through the Biomedinfra consortium, the service capacities of the CSC-IT Center for Science Ltd. - the ELIXIR Finland Node - are now made available in a new way for biomedical data processing. Implementation of the cloud technologies at CSC-IT Center for Science have been driven by biosciences use cases from research in Helsinki, Turku, Oulu, Copenhagen, Bergen, Munich and Cambridge with the support of the FIRI process for ELIXIR. Some of the impacts of the use cases, such as Webmicroscope by Fimmic Oy and Biobanking IT by BBMRI.fi, National Institute of Health and Welfare were demonstrated in the Science Corner during the event.
Videolink to ePouta service