ELIXIR Belgium

Summary:

ELIXIR Belgium or “ELIXIR infrastructure for Data and Services to strengthen Life Sciences Research Flanders” is an “International Research Infrastructure (IRI)” project of the “Flemish Research Foundation (FWO)”.

ELIXIR Belgium is the national node of ELIXIR, which is a major multinational European research infrastructure project in the life sciences/informatics community. It is the intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe, supporting life science research and its translation to medicine, environment, the bio-industries and society. The research infrastructure provides platforms and guidance for research data management and reproducible data analysis, and offers domain specific services for Plant and Biodiversity, Human health and COVID-19 research. It is a so-called “European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures” (ESFRI) initiative. ESFRI is a strategic instrument to develop the scientific integration of Europe and to strengthen its international outreach.

ELIXIR Belgium offers guidelines for research data management and analyses, domain-specific data-related training and workshops, web portals, resources like compute services, and partnerships with industry and SME’s.

Role of UHasselt:

From 2018-2022, our role within ELIXIR Belgium was to lead the use case multiple sclerosis within the cluster “human data” (work package 6) (together with KULeuven, Yves Moreau’s group, UAntwerp and VIB), where we constructed a federated infrastructure to connect (real world) datasets.

From 2023-2026, our research group will again play a role in ELIXIR Belgium and will focus on:

• Helping the consortium in a co-creative way to get a “Strategic Overview of Health Data Initiatives in a Complex Health Data Space”. Understand different initiatives that work on unlocking real-world health data, making real-world data accessible for research and/or innovation and/or policy. Also, get an idea about which aspect of the ecosystem the initiatives are working on and how they relate.
• Reducing sociological barriers in parallel with technical innovation (link with OHDSI Belgium).
• Working on top of “foundation Infrastructure”. Create a “playbook” through sandbox of use cases (from fully centralized to fully federated)