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Biobanking and Biomolecular resources Research Infrastructure-European Research Infrastructure Consortium

BBMRI-ERIC

BBMRI-ERIC is the European Research Infrastructure for biobanking and biomolecular resources, supporting health and life sciences research across 24 Member and Observer countries and IARC/WHO.

Lobbying Activity

Response to European Research Area (ERA) Act

10 Sept 2025

BBMRI-ERIC welcomes the opportunity to provide input to the European Commissions Call for Evidence on the European Research Area (ERA) Act. To ensure that the ERA Act fulfils its transformative potential, BBMRI-ERIC recommends the following priorities: Integration over duplication; Training, capacity building and service excellence; ERIC regulation amendment; Promoting interoperability and federated systems; Embedding One Health and sustainability principles. Please find more detailed recommendations attached. The ERA Act represents a significant opportunity to consolidate Europes research and innovation ecosystem and to secure the continents position as a global leader in scientific excellence and societal impact. Achieving the 3% of GDP R&D investment target will require coordinated action and a long-term vision, grounded in the efficient use of resources and the reinforcement of existing European Research Infrastructures. To this end, the Act must leverage established ERICs, provide sustainable EU-level funding mechanisms, and promote inclusivity across Member States. BBMRI-ERIC stands ready to contribute its expertise, infrastructure, and network to ensure the ERA Act becomes a catalyst for scientific advancement, innovation, and societal benefit.
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Response to European strategy on research and technology infrastructures

20 May 2025

BBMRI-ERIC (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure European Research Infrastructure Consortium) appreciates the opportunity to contribute to the European Commissions call for evidence Towards a European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures. We welcome the strategic ambition of the EC to strengthen Europes research and technology infrastructures and support a cohesive policy approach: BBMRI-ERIC agrees with the main problems and needs identified in the consultation. The fragmentation of the current research and innovation landscape, gaps in long-term sustainability, lack of integration with innovation ecosystems, and the underutilisation of available capacities are all valid and pressing issues. However, in terms of the strategy, we furthermore highlight the need for a clear strategic and operational distinction between Research and Technology Infrastructures. Without clear differentiation, there is a risk of duplication, competition for limited resources, and reduced clarity for Member States and users. To ensure that RIs and TIs can fulfil their complementary purposes, a framework is needed that defines boundaries, avoids overlaps, and incentivises cooperation and synergies rather than competition. We emphasise that the future strategy must therefore promote cooperation and complementarity between RIs (including ERICs) and TIs. These two types of infrastructures serve distinct yet interconnected roles within the European research and innovation ecosystem. TIs and RIs have different operational logics and funding requirements, and as such, a differentiated funding strategy is essential. While RIs mostly rely on public investment to ensure open access and long-term scientific excellence, TIs will operate closer to market deployment and should attract a mix of public and private funding. Furthermore, new financing instruments should be designed to support TIs without undermining the financial sustainability of RIs. Rather than treating these infrastructures as separate or competing entities, the strategy should also support collaborative models where RIs and TIs jointly contribute to European innovation capacity, each within their appropriate domain and funding framework. To strengthen the EUs competitiveness and leadership in high-value-added and critical technologies, it is furthermore essential to ensure that industry has streamlined access to the resources and services of RIs it needs to drive innovation. In particular, further connections between industry and ERICs, as the drivers of fundamental research also in health and life sciences, need to be harnessed also on the side of the EU. Current income from industry into ERICs, as allowed by the ERIC Regulation, continues to be underused; more could be done to explore this potential for cooperation. For example, BBMRI-ERIC is actively working to enhance its service offering to industry, with future plans to enable on demand sample and data collections. This targeted, responsive approach will accelerate R&D processes, ultimately supporting faster development of innovative and sustainable health solutions. To conclude, BBMRI-ERIC supports the development of a unified, forward-looking European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures. To be effective, this strategy must reinforce the strengths of the ERIC framework while clarifying its relationship with emerging and existing TIs. A coherent and sustainable system depends on strong coordination, long-term financial planning, and the promotion of complementarity among infrastructures. By embedding these principles, the strategy will ensure that Europes researchers, innovators, and industry have continued access to world-class facilities and services. About: BBMRI-ERIC is the European research infrastructure for biobanking and biomolecular resources in health and life sciences, with currently 25 Member and Observer countries. www.bbmri-eric.eu
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Meeting with Kasia Jurczak (Head of Unit Research and Innovation)

23 Apr 2025 · Presentation of BBMRI-ERIC and discussion on their role as clinical research infrastructure to support multi-country clinical trials in EU

Response to EU Life sciences strategy

16 Apr 2025

As BBMRI-ERIC, the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure - European Research Infrastructure Consortium, we support the initiative and call for evidence regarding a strategy for European life sciences. We share our detailed response in the attached document.
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Response to A European Health Data Space

3 Feb 2021

In general, BBMRI-ERIC welcomes the initiative for a European Health Data Space (EHDS). The roadmap/impact assessment correctly identifies problems hindering the creation of a single European market for data (section “Problems the initiative aims to tackle”) and discriminates health data between health care and health research data, including the peculiar issues with data privacy, sharing, and interoperability linked to sensitive data (“Context” and “Evaluation”). This marks a sharp, and very welcome change in approach by the Commission, which rightfully reassesses the large social impact of the European Health Data Space (“Likely social impacts”). The development of the EHDS cannot be timelier, with the launch of groundbreaking initiatives across the competences of the Commission, ranging from health (Beating Cancer Plan, COVID-19 response) to research (Horizon Europe Missions), innovation (AI) that can all tie together under a new EHDS to unlock the full potential of both a single European health data market. However, we believe it is imperative for the EHDS to acknowledge that the line between health care and health research is often blurry in practice and a division between primary use and secondary use of health data cannot be strictly upheld. Personalised medicine is a prominent example where health care and health research go increasingly hand in hand. Health data and digital workflows are at the intersection of primary care and research and need to be conceptualized from the start as complementary to reduce errors, avoid duplication of procedures and allow for innovative digital health solutions in the sector of health, as care and research are intertwined in practice. We therefore highly welcome the approach of this initiative to address the use of health data in its different aspects. The existing regulatory framework seems insufficient to deliver on the promises of the EHDS. Health data governance remains fragmented at national and regional level, hindering any effort to scale up research and healthcare solutions. Most importantly, it is necessary to protect and promote the use of health data, defining clear pan-European rules to overcome the existing gaps in practice. Therefore, it is necessary to complete the EU regulatory panorama to fill the gaps left in the GDPR concerning the use of health data. The EHDS shall take inspiration and build on existing efforts to provide clarity to the data protection legislation and health research, such as the Code of Conduct for Health Research. Since a mere harmonized implementation of the GDPR will most likely not address all challenges sufficiently (see also attachment), we strongly support policy option A from the roadmap/impact assessment, leading to a new, specific regulatory framework to protect the ethical and safe secondary use of health data. Finally, the EHDS must be established based on existing European research infrastructures and exploit already developed models for joint services provided by BBMRI-ERIC and other RIs (e.g., via the cluster-projects CORBEL or EOSC-Life) for example, through joint Service Level Agreements. In order to reach the declared goals of the EHDS as well as implement them in due time, it is critical to connect to the achievements of the initiatives or research infrastructures already working towards these joint goals (e.g., 1MGP, ADOPT BBMRI-ERIC, EOSC-Life, AMRI). The upcoming EHDS should take the know-how, tools or full fletched infrastructures of the multiple contexts working with health data into account. In addition, the creation of the EHDS can be built on the experience regarding the collection and use of health data for research purposes in an ethically and legally compliant way. RIs already facilitate access to health data, and have a crucial and well-established harmonization and standardization role within the scientific and health research community.
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Response to European Partnership for innovative health

27 Aug 2019

We strongly agree with the Commission’s assessment on the success of the past European Partnership in health. Academia and research-intensive health industries need a vibrant, world-class, inter-connected health and research ecosystem to effectively translate ideas and knowledge into health interventions for patients. IMI and IMI2 have provided reliable solutions to this need: European biomedical research infrastructures such as BBMRI (biobanking), EATRIS (translational research) and ECRIN (clinical research) are currently involved in several IMI2 projects, and overall the results were very positive. Building on the successes of IMI2, we suggest building a funding mechanism that will strengthen public private collaboration opportunities and that will capitalise on Europe’s past investments by incentivising more explicitly the use of European Research Infrastructures in the next European Partnership for Innovative Health. The EU and Members States invested considerable resources in the design and implementation of research infrastructures in the field of biomedical research. Research Infrastructures play a role in creating, harmonising and ensuring the adoption of common standards, and in the translation of scientific knowledge into true patient benefit. The combination of Public Private Partnerships such as the IMI and European infrastructures has contributed significantly to the boosting of Europe’s translational research power – turning science in to new treatments: the new European Partnership must leverage more on the power and network of research infrastructures such as BBMRI, EATRIS and ECRIN. The next step for Europe is to bring these two success stories in health research closer and design a new path together, where industry, research infrastructures, patients and the EU are co-creators of new public-private partnerships: - For health research to be more efficient and standardised: as the existing infrastructures develop common standards and interoperable tools, they should be adequately resourced and used as service providers in EU-funded projects whenever they are fit for purpose. - To ensure sustainability: stable infrastructures secure the preservation and support the further development of high quality outputs of publicly and privately funded projects that are useful for the entire scientific community, including data and sample collections, analytical tools and methodologies, and clinical trial networks to name but a few. - PPPs are an important tool for infrastructures to reinforce their role as enablers of translational research. In light of these considerations, we believe option 0 from section B of the inception impact assessment would not serve EU citizens, researchers and biomedical industry. Option 1 provides strong continuity with the previous programming period, and therefore we believe this option bears the highest chances of successfully delivering a new PPP that would build on the successes of IMI and IMI2. We recommend developing this option, by making research infrastructures and other key stakeholders (patients organizations, healthcare professionals) co-creators and full partners of the new PPP. Regarding option 2, the inception impact assessment does not provide sufficient information as per the general implementation of the “long-term” implementing structured mentioned. However, option 2 would undermine the level of collaboration (in kind) that industry provided in the previous European Partnership.
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