We bring interdisciplinary communities together, harmonize and connect diverse data, and deliver large-scale research infrastructure – all at the national and international scale. This enables major advances for human and planetary health, maximizes public investments in science, and fosters Swiss reputation, sovereignty and competitiveness.
Explore our mandates, projects and initiatives on:
SIB’s independence and established position in the ecosystem acts as a booster for collaborations among stakeholders. Our work together led, for example, to the first ever nationwide project in medical genetics, bringing together all Swiss academic centres in the discipline.
Federating the Swiss bioinformatics community
SIB federates the national bioinformatics community through a network of affiliated groups, whose leaders are recognized experts in the field. Their host institutions are partners of SIB and represent the major academic and research institutions of Switzerland.
Federating this community is of utmost importance for Switzerland – and part of our mandate from the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) – to maintain Swiss bioinformatics at the leading edge of worldwide life science and innovation. This capability, which is unique in the country, also maximizes the impact of public and private investments by increasing data interoperability, developing common standards in line with international ones, and facilitating scientific collaboration.
SIB offers its national network joint activities for sharing best practices and fostering collaborations, for instance, in the form of focus groups. SIB also organizes scientific events and conferences and provides support in areas ranging from grant management and scientific promotion to legal expertise or technology transfer. The common thread in all these activities is scientific excellence and collaboration.
Finally, this national network also gives SIB the legitimacy to represent Switzerland in bioinformatics-related initiatives on the international scene and to grow our country’s visibility in scientific excellence and innovation.
Connecting Swiss bioinformatics to global data initiatives
The Swiss bioinformatics community needs to be linked to international endeavours to prevent researchers from being isolated in the science landscape. Through activities such as establishing and implementing international standards to increase data interoperability, participating in federated initiatives as a Swiss node or leading work packages at the European level (see below), SIB is boosting the profile of Switzerland in the world.
SIB has established links and collaborations with global organizations such as:
- ELIXIR, the intergovernmental organization bringing together life science resources from across Europe, of which SIB is the Swiss node. Our involvement spans a range of topics, from maintaining Swiss open software and databases for life sciences through the Service Delivery Plan, to co-leading work packages in European projects or platforms. A key example of this is the co-steering of European efforts to foster open sharing of SARS-CoV-2 genomic data in the ELIXIR-CONVERGE project.
SIB Resources selected as ELIXIR Core Data Resources
- The Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH), a worldwide organization which seeks to enable responsible genomic data sharing and includes SIB as a member.
- The Global Biodata Coalition, the forum for research funders to foster efficient management and growth of biodata resources worldwide. Our institute contributed to its setup and our former Executive Directors are now part of the Scientific Advisory Board.
SIB Resources selected as Global Core Biodata Resources
Implementing national and international research infrastructure
Thanks to our national coordination activities, our institute is naturally positioned to set up national or international infrastructures, be it in the field of open research data (ORD) or clinical research data.
Coordinating open research data
Since its inception, SIB has been committed to open science and disseminating FAIR principles as widely as possible. ORD is coordinated at SIB through the open resources developed by its members which are essential data bricks to implement open science.
We are further advancing open science in Switzerland and Europe through our involvement with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) – a strategically important initiative that enables researchers to access and share research data and services across disciplines and borders. SIB is a member of the EOSC Association, a partner in various EOSC projects to ensure the long-term preservation, trustworthiness and discoverability of Europe’s data assets, and a partner in a Swiss collaboration to connect national research data, services and infrastructure with EOSC.
Coordinating clinical research data
Many European public-private projects tackling diabetes, cancer or obesity, rely on our expertise for the coordination, management and analysis of sensitive data from different countries. By regularly acting as Data Coordination Centre in these projects, we fulfil a crucial need for a reliable, neutral and efficient partner, able to interact with actors from the private sector as well as academia and to overcome complex scientific and legal challenges through innovative technical solutions. Our federated analysis and database approach is an example of these solutions: find out how we applied it in the context of a project to fight diabetes.
Explore our contributions to European public-private projects
We also coordinate clinical research data in large national infrastructure such as the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) – which makes health data interoperable and shareable for research in Switzerland. In this context, we also implemented and continue to coordinate BioMedIT, which provides secure computational infrastructure, services, and competencies for biomedical research in Switzerland. SPHN is under the responsibility of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) in collaboration with SIB.
We further support clinical research, pathogen surveillance and diagnostics through infrastructure solutions that we coordinate and develop as part of large consortia. Examples include the Centre for Pathogen Bioinformatics, which strengthens bioinformatics infrastructure and stakeholder collaboration for national and global epidemic preparedness, and SwissGenVar, a nationwide effort connecting all major academic institutions for medical genetics in Switzerland.
Coordinating environmental data
Conservation researchers and practitioners similarly rely on our data expertise for actionable insights into environmental protection. In the Biodiversity Meets Data project, for example, we are facilitating the use of diverse biodiversity and environmental data from multiple sources – and enabling the use of these data for monitoring and assessing European biodiversity at a scale not previously possible.
