UniProt is allocated nearly half of new Horizon Europe funding announced today to safeguard three critical biodata resources for the life sciences and biotechnology. The grant involves its two European co-developers, SIB and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). It affirms the critical value of four decades of Swiss expertise in protein data curation and stewardship for Europe's competitiveness, data sovereignty and ability to address health and environmental challenges. It also reinforces SIB's vital provision of open data and knowledge that underpin research, innovation and trustworthy AI.
Supporting biodata resources of strategic importance to Europe
The European Commission today announced a total of €57 million to safeguard three biodata resources, to help ensure that researchers and innovators retain open, reliable access to essential information on genes, proteins and scientific discoveries.
In addition to UniProt, these are: GENCODE, the reference gene annotation of the human and mouse genomes run by EMBL-EBI in partnership with the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG; €19 million); and Europe PMC, the open-access life-science literature repository managed by EMBL-EBI (€8 million). The funding is subject to evaluation of grant agreements, following normal Horizon Europe procedures.
New funding stream supports UniProt’s long-term sustainability
UniProt accelerates scientific progress, innovation and the development of reliable AI systems by providing high-quality, freely accessible data and knowledge on hundreds of millions of proteins across the tree of life. As evidence of its fundamental importance to the life sciences and innovation, the resource is mentioned in over 200,000 scientific publications and patent publications, generates enormous efficiency gains for users, and was an essential source of training data for AlphaFold – the Nobel-winning AI that transformed drug discovery, biotechnology and more by predicting the 3D structure of proteins (see below). This importance is reflected in its recognition as an SIB Resource, ELIXIR Core Data Resource and Global Core Biodata Resource.
Supporting biodata resources of strategic importance to Europe
The European Commission today announced a total of €57 million to safeguard three biodata resources, to help ensure that researchers and innovators retain open, reliable access to essential information on genes, proteins and scientific discoveries.
In addition to UniProt, these are: GENCODE, the reference gene annotation of the human and mouse genomes run by EMBL-EBI in partnership with the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG; €19 million); and Europe PMC, the open-access life-science literature repository managed by EMBL-EBI (€8 million). The funding is subject to evaluation of grant agreements, following normal Horizon Europe procedures.
The knowledgebase requires stable, sustained support to ensure uninterrupted access, keep pace with new technologies and ever-growing data on proteins, and adapt to the evolving needs of researchers, industry and AI developers. At present, the more than 100 people who maintain and develop UniProt at its three partner institutions – SIB, EMBL-EBI and the Protein Information Resource (PIR) – benefit from long-standing support by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) and EMBL, as well as more recent, shorter-term support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
The new €30 million Horizon Europe grant provides further diversification and a welcome boost to UniProt’s sustainability. Available from 2027 for up to seven years, the funding is to support the scientific and technical work needed to maintain the resource, curate its protein sequences (see below) and keep pace with growing volumes of biological data.
The support reflects the EU’s commitment to open science and to maintaining the infrastructure needed for international research cooperation.
Europe’s strength lies in the combination of world-class national capabilities and deep cross-border collaboration. This investment builds on that distinctive model, connecting complementary expertise and infrastructure across the continent to reinforce Europe’s competitiveness in science, AI and biotechnology.
Affirmation of essential Swiss biodata expertise
SIB develops and maintains UniProt’s expertly curated Swiss-Prot knowledgebase, created in Geneva in 1986 by Amos Bairoch who went on to found SIB. The team’s work includes:
- quality control of protein sequences;
- expert annotation of protein sequences with verified, up-to-date information on their structure and function, curated from the scientific literature;
- developing AI tools to enhance and accelerate this data curation;
- ensuring interoperability with other databases and knowledgebases through metadata and annotation standards, such as Rhea for enzymatic reactions and Gene Ontology for functions;
- ensuring the knowledge is both machine-readable and accessible to people.
The benefits of this work to the scientific community were quantified in an independent 2025 study, which valued user efficiency gains at €373–565 million a year – 25–39 times UniProt’s average annual operating cost. The work also contributes to trustworthy AI: the developers of the Nobel-winning AlphaFold, for example, used the expert annotations to understand and debug the model’s performance.
The EU’s decision to invest in UniProt, and its choice of SIB as a key partner to deliver the work, reinforce the position of Switzerland as an international hub of high-quality data, AI expertise and collaboration.
As AI speeds life-science research and innovation, the need for reliable data and knowledge keeps growing. This complementary funding through Horizon Europe will contribute to ensuring scientists, clinicians, innovators and AI developers can continue to access the growing body of high-quality, expertly curated information on proteins in UniProt.
