EMBL-EBI Secures £45 Million UK Government Funding to Advance Life Sciences Infrastructure

VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) has learned that the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), located in Cambridge, UK, announced on March 14, 2019, that it had secured £45 million (approximately $59.7 million) in funding from the UK government. This funding, provided through United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI), is designated for expanding its infrastructure to enhance the institute’s computational, storage, and construction capabilities.

The European Bioinformatics Institute develops freely available databases, tools, and software to support the alignment, validation, and visualization of data generated from publicly funded research. It is also involved in projects such as the Human Cell Atlas and the UK Biobank.

This investment fully embodies the government’s industrial strategy, under which the UK government will commit the largest amount of funding in its history to ensure that the United Kingdom remains globally competitive in the life sciences sector.

“The European Bioinformatics Institute’s capacity to process, access, and query vast amounts of data is essential for scientific discovery in the 21st century, particularly in the fields of genomics and molecular biology,” said Mark Walport, Chief Executive of UK Biobank, in a statement. “This funding enables EMBL-EBI to continue strengthening its global leadership in large-scale biological datasets and bioinformatics, which are utilized daily by researchers around the world.”

Dr. Ewan Birney, Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), stated, “The EBI website receives more than 38 million data or analysis requests daily. Over the past decade, demand for our data resources has surged dramatically, and we anticipate this trend will continue; therefore, we must prepare accordingly. Building a robust and accessible data infrastructure is crucial for life sciences discoveries in the coming decades.”

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI, fully known as EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute) is an academic institution of an intergovernmental international organization, dedicated to addressing life science questions through bioinformatics approaches. Established in 1994 and located at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in southern Cambridge, United Kingdom, it is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, fully known as European Molecular Biology Laboratory).

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) provides the scientific community with free bioinformatics resources, promotes basic research, and offers training and dissemination of cutting-edge technologies. EBI manages and maintains multiple large-scale public bioinformatics databases spanning genomics, proteomics, cheminformatics, transcriptomics, and systems biology, while also developing a variety of tools to enable researchers to analyze and share data. The institute offers a premier research environment, numerous interdisciplinary collaboration opportunities, and training courses available worldwide.

UK Biobank is the most comprehensive large-scale human information resource established to date worldwide. The project’s data are accessible to researchers globally, with strict safeguards in place to protect volunteer privacy. Its mission is to provide research data and biological samples to scientists investigating how genetic and environmental factors jointly influence disease risk, thereby elucidating the relationships among genes, lifestyle, and health, enhancing understanding of disease etiology, and improving human quality of life.

United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a new organization that collaborates with universities, research institutions, businesses, charities, and the government to create an optimal environment for research and innovation. UKRI operates across the entire United Kingdom, with a total budget exceeding £7 billion.

(Compiled by Ning Chen)