UK Research and Innovation has awarded an initial £6.3 million funding to support the development of BioFAIR

The concept of BioFAIR was developed by ELIXIR-UK; what started as a pilot study proposal in 2020 led to us working with Technopolis Group to carry out a full Feasibility Study in 2021, and in turn to a successful joint proposal for “BioFAIR; A data commons infrastructure for biological and biomedical sciences, to enhance the sharing, management and reuse of UKRI-supported data”

BioFAIR seeks to connect life science data currently stored at different institutions and repositories. By bridging the gap between researchers, institutional data repositories, and existing data infrastructures, the project hopes to accelerate discoveries and innovation.

This significant investment will help ELIXIR-UK to deliver its central mission: to enable the research community to better manage, share and analyse biological data.

Professor Neil Hall, Joint Head of Node said: “Biology is increasingly becoming a big data science. Life scientists generate large and complex data sets, which have huge potential to transform our understanding of life on Earth – but only if we can make sense of all the data. 

“This investment will not only empower researchers by providing the resources they need for better data management and analyses, it will also ensure data is preserved beyond the lifespan of an individual research project so the most value can be extracted from it.”

Professor Carole Goble, Joint Head of Node said: “BioFAIR will be a national Data and Analysis Commons to provide a shared space where researchers can manage their own data to be FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable – but also share and use other datasets and access advanced data analysis systems. 

“The Commons will join up with public datasets and UK infrastructure investments to provide the end-to-end data management and data flows needed to drive UK bioscience research.”

BioFAIR is one of 23 major infrastructure projects to benefit from a £481 million package announced by UKRI. The aim is to deliver cutting-edge facilities and equipment by investing in research and innovation infrastructure over the next three years.