Autumn 2023 was busy for the ELIXIR industry programme: the annual ELIXIR Bioinformatics and Industry Forum (EBIF) was held in London in November and ELIXIR presented at two industry conferences, BioTechX and Bio-IT World. The main focus of the events was Trusted Research Environments (TREs), which approved researchers with a single location to access valuable datasets.
At BioTechX in Basel Switzerland, ELIXIR held a panel discussion on “Trusted research environments for sharing data in life sciences”. Panellists from Luxembourg National Data Service (LNDS), EOSC Association, Genomics England, AstraZeneca and SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics discussed ways to harmonise standards of TREs and addressed the importance of ethical and legal elements on genomic data sharing and use in TREs.
The ELIXIR Bioinformatics Industry Forum 2023 also focused on the topic of building TREs for sharing data in life sciences. More than 90 participants attended the forum, from which 40% were industry representatives from large, medium and small enterprises. Speakers from ELIXIR and other European organisations shared their views on the importance of collaboration, particularly building trust. In session two, seven speakers from industry shared technical solutions for enabling data access and analysis in TREs for life science.
Following the success of roundtable discussions at the 2022 event, the discussion format was used again and stimulate exchanges of ideas around seven core topics on TREs:
- Privacy-first data sharing and collaboration
- Security of data in use in federated environments
- Serverless cloud data processing: private, FAIR, and federated
- FAIR data management in federated TREs
- User perspectives for international standards for data processing
- A framework for running analyses across multiple TREs
- Research environments can be built, but trust must be earned - the patient's perspective
At the end of November, ELIXIR hosted two sessions with a series of presentations and panel discussions in Bio-IT World Europe Conference on the topics of data management, cloud computing and storage infrastructure showcasing the work on facilitating the storage, organisation and analysis of large-scale biological data as a research infrastructure. To address the importance of collaborative efforts in research data management, ELIXIR invited speakers from Pistoia Alliance and AstraZeneca to join members from ELIXIR Nodes to showcase outcomes of ELIXIR’s collaborative approaches, such as the FAIR Cookbook, the AIR Toolkit and activities of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform that enable scalable and secure data analysis. For the cloud computing and storage infrastructure session, speakers presented the European Genomic Data Infrastructure project, the Luxembourg National Data Service centre and two companies, CGG and Unison showcased their technical approach.
All three industry engagement events provided valuable opportunities to discuss ELIXIR’s approach with a range of stakeholders from the private sector. The discussions will inform ELIXIR’s work in the area of TREs, particularly the EOSC-ENTRUST project, coordinated by ELIXIR, which starts on 1 March 2024.
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