The Global Biodata Coalition 2026-2030

Description du projet

Un coup de pouce pour la Global Biodata Coalition

Les sciences de la vie sont entrées dans l’ère du Big Data, où les percées dans les domaines de la génomique, de la protéomique et de la découverte de médicaments dépendent de référentiels numériques de haute qualité. Cependant, la fragilité des infrastructures menace ces progrès. La plupart des bases de données biologiques essentielles au monde sont nées de bourses de recherche à court terme. Dans ce contexte, la Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) a été créée en 2020 afin de promouvoir la collaboration et d’élaborer des stratégies pour la durabilité à long terme des ressources en biodonnées. Le projet GBC 2026-2030, financé par l’UE, entend progresser le GBC. Il élargira le secrétariat de coordination afin de renforcer l’engagement avec les organismes de financement et de consolider les efforts avec les fournisseurs d’infrastructures de données biologiques. Cette initiative rassemble les communautés pour explorer et déployer de nouveaux modèles de durabilité.

Objectif

Life science research is increasingly data-intensive. Biodata resources that collate, curate, analyse and distribute research data across biological scales, disciplines and fields are used universally and globally. New technologies and the exponential growth of these resources create huge opportunities. Despite the critical and essential nature of this infrastructure, it lacks sustainability: it relies financially on research grants from single funding organisations, making them vulnerable to priority changes. The lack of strategic coordination between data resources and research funders has led to fragility for individual resources and the global infrastructure as a whole.

A number of funding organisations established the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) to address sustainability. Since 2020, this group has engaged stakeholders to better characterise the global biodata infrastructure, understand sustainability needs, and formulate approaches to its attainment. The GBC to date offers a rich and essential foundation to support engagement, planning and implementation across funding organisations and biodata resources, needed for longer term sustainability.

This new project will build on these foundations to build the GBC in its next stage of development, which is urgently required. It will establish new governance structures for a growing GBC, with a major focus on developing a community of biodata infrastructure funders, over and above the existing (international) cooperation mechanisms. This will be driven by expanding the coordinating secretariat to reinvigorate and substantially broaden engagement with existing and potential funding organisations. This proposal will consolidate and extend work with the providers of biodata infrastructure and, critically, bring these two communities together to explore, pilot and implement new sustainability models and actions to achieve the greatest sustainability of the global biodata infrastructure.