EATRIS-Plus in a nutshell

Our flagship project EATRIS-Plus aims to build further capabilities and deliver innovative scientific tools to support the long-term sustainability strategy of EATRIS as one of Europe’s key European research infrastructures for Personalised Medicine.

The main goals of the EATRIS-Plus will be to:

• Consolidate EATRIS capacities in the field of Personalised Medicine (particularly omics technologies) to better serve academia and industry and augment the number of EATRIS Innovation Hubs with large pharma;
• Drive patient empowerment through active involvement in the infrastructure’s operations;
• Expand strategic partnerships with research infrastructures and other relevant stakeholders, and
• Further strengthen the long-term sustainability of the EATRIS financial model.

EATRIS-Plus Consortium

The consortium is composed of 19 partners including all current national nodes of the research infrastructure, academic representatives of new prospective member countries as well as umbrella organisations representing the patients’ voice and biotech companies.

• EATRIS-ERIC, The Netherlands
• Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia
• Madrid Health Service, Spain
• University of Helsinki, Finland
• Luxembourg Institute of Health/Integrated Biobank Of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Radboud University Medical Centre, The Netherlands
• University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Riga Stradins University, Latvia
• Uppsala University, Sweden
• Technical University of Munich, Germany
• European Patients’ Forum, Luxembourg
• Vall D’Hebron Research Institute, Spain
• CEA-NeurATRIS, France
• Italian National Institute of Health, Italy
• University Of Oslo, Norway
• BIOCAT, Spain
• INFARMED, Portugal
• Sofia University, Bulgaria

Work Packages

WP1 – Multi-omic technologies for Personalised Medicine

WP2 – Data Stewardship and integration of omic research in Personalised Medicine

WP3 – Quality Assessment for omic technologies

WP4 – Long-term Sustainability Planning

WP5 – Stakeholder Engagement

WP6 – Industry Collaboration and Open Innovation Models

WP7 – Training

WP8 – International Collaboration

WP9 – Coordination and Management

WP10 – Ethics Requirements

Backstory and the Scientific Rationale – Why we are doing this?

Efficient advancement of Personalised Medicine depends on the availability of validated patient-targeted biomarkers. However, as our capacity to identify genetic variants associated with complex diseases increases, these do not fully recapitulate the resulting disease phenotypes, and a more precise understanding of the molecular profiles are needed.

This realisation provides a rationale for the development of multi-omic approaches. In order to turn the multi-omic promises into a reality, systemic bottlenecks impacting the biomarker field needs to be overcome:

• Poor levels of technological and analytical harmonisation;
• Poor data stewardship and compliance to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles;
• Lack of understanding of the relationship between genomic biomarkers and downstream molecular markers (transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, among others);
• Lack of reliable control reference values for these biomarkers in healthy populations;
• and Poor understanding of the clinical needs resulting in limited clinical adoption.

Tackling those issues in a systematic way is one of our main objectives. The consortium ambitions to deliver a multi-omic toolbox to support cross omic analysis and data integration in clinical samples. This toolbox will contain:

• Consensus-based SOPs for omic technologies;
• Guidelines for omic analytical processes;
• Validated reference materials for analytical processes;
• Quality parameters for benchmarking quality assessment activities;
• Data analytical and FAIRification tools;
• Criteria for establishing reference values in population cohorts;
• Troubleshooting guidelines;
• Access to a repository of multi-omic reference values

The omic tools will be developed and tested with a real-setting demonstrator, an already established cohort of 1,000 healthy individuals in Czechia upon whom genomic sequencing has been already performed. Information available on this healthy individual cohort will be augmented during the project with transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic data.

By providing such toolbox to the research community, EATRIS-Plus will be the engine to enable high-quality research in the context of patient stratification and accelerate the implementation of Personalised Medicine solutions. EATRIS is the European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine providing services for accelerating biomedical innovation.