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After a long time in the making, INFRAFRONTIER has officially become an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). This significant milestone emphasises INFRAFRONTIER’s dedication to excellence and collaboration across Europe in pioneering research initiatives. It would not have been possible without the support of the Founding Members: Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece and Sweden. Exciting times coming!
The new state-of-the-art BSL-3 laboratory for work with highly infectious viruses and bacteria in the Czech Republic opened in March at the Czech Centre for Phenogenomics (CCP).
Staff from Oulu EMMA node and Oulu Laboratory Animal Centre visited the axenic and gnotobiology facilities at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC), Lisbon.
As part of the ERN-ITHACA network actions, partners from the Children’s Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw, visited Oulu University Hospital and University of Oulu in Finland. The guests received a series of trainings on molecular genetic methods.
Virtual mindmap shows the way through a diverse network of research options for Rare Diseases
The European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD), coordinating 130 institutions from 35 countries, is the largest international network of activities to fight the more than 7,000 known rare diseases. Launched by the European Commission in 2019, the programme´s vital goal is to create a comprehensive, sustainable European and worldwide “rare diseases ecosystem” – allowing a virtuous circle between research, care and medical innovation.
The interest in the scientific community to fight the pandemic using mouse models is remarkably high. In December 2020, INFRAFONTIER launched an attractive free-of-charge service for the biomedical research community fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic: The COVID-19 Therapeutics Pipeline Trans-national Access (TA) Call offered academic researchers to test their novel therapeutics and vaccine candidates in a preclinical Bio-Safety Level 3 (BSL3) pipeline using COVID-19 optimized mouse models
A new EBRA cluster will coordinate the predictive use of animal models in brain research
The European Union and its member states have been investing in research to better understand the human brain and its disorders for many years.
The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium has announced the election of a new Senior Leadership Team (SLT): Radislav Sedlácek is the new Chairman of IMPC, and Yann Herault the new Vice-Chair. Steve Brown, who was the Chair for many years, has stepped down to become the Past Chair. All three of them are long-term members of IMPC as well as INFRAFRONTIER.
KOMP program director Colin Fletcher and his colleague Oleg Mirochnitchenko from NIH, former RIKEN BRC director Yuichi Obata, Ann Flenniken from TCP and Luis Santos from MRC Harwell are the winners of this year´s IMPC Awards.
Each year in autumn, the Steering Committee of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) honours several members of the consortium with the IMPC Awards of Excellence in three categories:
By funding £20 million into a new National Mouse Genetics Network, the British Medical Research Council (MRC) acknowledges the critical importance of the mouse as an experimental model. The Mary Lyon Centre (MLC) in Harwell will serve as the national facility hub of the new network.
Lydia Teboul from INFRAFRONTIER partner MRC Harwell has been awarded the 3Rs Prize 2020 of the International Society for Transgenic Technologies (ISTT). The prize recognises Lydia’s work in developing a new technique to reduce the number of animals used in research.
Munich / Stockholm – Karolinska Institutet, one of the world´s leading medical universities selecting the Nobel Prize laureates in Physiology or Medicine every year, is now a co-owner of INFRAFRONTIER GmbH.
GV-SOLAS, the German Society for Laboratory Animal Research, is Europe´s oldest and largest association of animal research experts of all kind –scientists, veterinary doctors, animal keepers, and operators of animal facilities. Its annual meeting 2018 was held on 12 to 14 September in Munich.
In a new Trans-national Access Call INFRAFRONTIER offers open access to its infrastructure and expertise for researchers who need rat mutant models to be generated for their scientific aims. It’s the first time that the European research infrastructure for modeling human diseases via mammalian genomes expands its unique services to generate not only mouse, but rat models for its users.
Health Data Research UK will invest £30 million in a newly developed big data approach for health and biomedical informations from all over the country. Starting in April 2018, only six sites in the UK with high-class expertise in the management of health data will be part of the new public venture.
The European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) officially launched its Roadmap 2016 Report on an event held in Amsterdam on 10 March 2016 organised under the Dutch EU Presidency.
The Report lists 29 “ESFRI Landmarks”, one of them is INFRAFRONTIER. ESFRI Landmarks are research infrastructures that were implemented or started implementation before 2015 and are now considered “major elements of competitiveness of the European Research Area”.
INFRAFRONTIER is partner in two new Horizon 2020 projects that started on 01 September: CORBEL and RItrain.
CORBEL brings together the ESFRI Biological and Medical Research Infrastructures (BMS RI) to develop common services and harmonised access procedures to facilitate groundbreaking interdisciplinary research in the area of the life sciences. Together, the BMS RI cover the entire range from the discovery of basic biological mechanisms to applied medical translation.
The function of the majority of genes in the mouse and human genomes remains unknown. The mouse embryonic stem cell knockout resource provides a basis for the characterization of relationships between genes and phenotypes. The EUMODIC consortium developed and validated robust methodologies for the broad-based phenotyping of knockouts through a pipeline comprising 20 disease-oriented platforms. This consortium developped new statistical methods for pipeline design and data analysis aimed at detecting reproducible phenotypes with high power.
The IPAD-MD project, Research Infrastructures for Phenotyping, Archiving and Distribution of Mouse Diseases Models, will address the coordination and cooperation between INFRAFRONTIER and complementary research infrastructures world-wide contributing to the global effort of IMPC, has been funded under the EC Horizon 2020 Programme.
The management system of German Mouse Clinic has been successfully audited and certified by TÜV SÜD according to the Quality Management System Standards EN ISO 9001: 2008.
Reproducibility and traceability of analytical data, documentation, transparency and continuity are the cornerstones of the German Mouse Clinic quality management system. The certification reflects the German Mouse Clinic commitment to promote research activities at the highest level in science and scientific standards.
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Cryoport, Inc. the only end-to-end cryogenic logistics solutions provider, entered into an agreement with the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA), a part of INFRAFRONTIER, the European Research Infrastructure for phenotyping and archiving of model mammalian genomes
enOway guarantees freedom to operate (FTO) and offers important time gain in conditional knockout development time for industry scientists.
Second phenotyping call of the EC FP7 funded INFRAFRONTIER-I3 project open until March 15, 2014.
A total of 22 mouse mutant lines can be characterised through a broad based primary phenotyping pipeline in all the major adult organ systems and most areas of major human disease.
In a formal act authenticated by a notary in Munich, four founding members acquired shares of the INFRAFRONTIER GmbH: the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) from France, the Biomedical Sciences Research Center ‘Alexander Fleming’ from Greece, the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Acedemy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and the University of Oulu in Finland.
INFRAFRONTIER project was included in a selection of ESFRI projects, currently in implementation phase, to feature in the ESFRI brochure on ‘European Research Infrastructures with global impact’, published for the 10th anniversary of ESFRI. With the publication of this brochure, ESFRI intents to make the general public more broadly aware of the ESFRI itself and of the goals of the different ESFRI Research Infrastructures.
