As the year draws to a close, we highlight examples of projects and competitive funding secured in 2025 that expand SIB’s impact – from personalized health and biodiversity to trustworthy AI and Swiss competitiveness. Thank you to our teams and members for making it possible, as well as our partners and funders.
(Re)discover what drives SIB
Before diving into this 2025 snapshot, here’s a 90-second overview of bioinformatics and why our work is so important:
Advancing open science in Switzerland and Europe
- Designing and testing a federated framework to connect Swiss research infrastructures with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as part of a new national initiative, SENPro, funded by swissuniversities.
- Ensuring the long-term preservation, trustworthiness and discoverability of Europe’s data assets through three new European-level projects: EOSC EDEN, FIDELIS, and EOSC Data Commons – the latter of which is developing a platform for AI-based discovery of data and tools.
- Strengthening essential databases and tools for research and innovation by: adding three Swiss biodata resources to the SIB Portfolio; co-creating the most complete, accurate resource for human gene functions, PAN-GO; and integrating a customized generative AI tool, ExpasyGPT, into Expasy, the Swiss bioinformatics resource portal, to enable faster answers to complex biological questions.
Reinforcing national and global efforts for epidemic preparedness
- Consolidating Switzerland’s leadership for evidence-based global pathogen response with the launch of SIB’s Centre for Pathogen Bioinformatics.
- Boosting the country’s capacity to combat bacterial threats by extending the capabilities of the Swiss Pathogen Surveillance Platform (SPSP), one of the Centre’s resources, through two new projects: one on antimicrobial resistance funded by the FOPH, and one to handle a broader range of bacterial species funded by swissuniversities.
- Supporting global infectious disease research and public health responses with the Centre’s flagship project, the Pathogen Data Network, which received renewed funding by the NIH.
Accelerating the secure use of patient data for personalized health research
- Coordinating Switzerland’s entry into the Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (FEGA), a secure global network of human genomics data.
- Making federated cancer data across Europe available to scientists, clinicians, AI developers and other health innovators, as part of two new public-private projects, UNCAN-Connect and CANDLE.
- Supporting a new avenue for pharmaceutical and other companies to safely generate insights from consented patient data as part of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN).
Enhancing data-driven environmental protection
- Facilitating the use of diverse biodiversity and environmental data from multiple sources, including through a strategy for the ELIXIR Biodiversity, Food Security and Pathogens (BFSP) Priority Area and integrating biodiversity genomics and text mining through a recently awarded Swiss National Science Foundation grant.
- Enabling conservation insights and actions from biodiversity data in the Biodiversity Meets Data project to develop tools for monitoring and assessing European biodiversity at a scale not previously possible, and through a global strategy for 10x faster sequencing of all known plants, animals, and other eukaryotic species for Phase II of the Earth BioGenome Project.
- Supporting science-policy initiatives, in particular the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in a Memorandum of Understanding with Senckenberg Nature Research.
Supporting Swiss competitiveness through data-science expertise
- The user benefits of one resource in SIB’s Portfolio, UniProt, were calculated as 39 times higher than operational costs. Its value is particularly important to Switzerland, with global Swiss companies or subsidiaries comprising three of the top five organizations publishing patents mentioning this unique, high-quality knowledgebase for proteins.
See further contributions and commentaries on Swiss competitiveness
