Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

The connectome is a map of all neural connections in the brain that can provide information about the brain’s (re)wiring in neurological diseases, injuries, or drugs responses. The use of connectomes in clinical practice has enormous potential to improve treatment efficacy, enhance patient stratification, disease characterization, and ultimately diagnosis. However, the means to clinically utilize connectomes are limited. Therefore neurologists still rely on subjective analysis of brain scans. Although the use of big data tools in neuro-diagnostics is growing, no commercial application for clinical practice is available yet. Biomax developed the first commercial solution to translate big connectome data into clinically relevant information: NeuroXM. In combination with patients’ clinical data this can be valorized to improve neuro-diagnosis. NeuroXM has successfully undergone pilot studies at two major institutes. The proprietary NeuroXM platform includes all features and security levels that are required in the clinic. Biomax is a strong bioinformatic SME with 20 years’ experience, including >25 European grants, 5 successful bioinformatic products, and a pioneering reputation. NeuroXM targets a very large and diverse neurology market with multiple clinical applications, e.g. diagnosis of dementia using brain imaging, detecting brain wiring “disconnections” in schizophrenia, and establishing treatment efficacy (longitudinal assessments of the connectome). This SME Phase 1 project will assess the feasibility of these different applications, which will help Biomax to establish a Go/No-go for further clinical validation for the specific clinical applications. With a strong first mover advantage and freedom to operate, NeuroXM has the potential to become the gold standard for working with connectome data. Commercialization of NeuroXM will provide Biomax a cumulative revenue of €47,4 million (2025) and further company growth.

TranSYS will recruit 15 ESRs to highly skilled jobs in the new area of Systems Health developing tools and approaches to exploit large and complex datasets, to advance Precision (Personalised) Medicine in several disease areas. The training programme and experience of different international research environments cuts across traditional data and life sciences silos. The emphasis on translational research will support new collaborations between academics and the pharma and health analytics sectors. Our ESR projects will advance the state of the art on biomarker discovery, improve understanding of disease-specific molecular mechanism and target identification for optimal diagnostics, disease risk and treatment management, refine data generation and their management (including warehousing, disease specific and standardised approaches for data processing, visualisation and model development) leading to improved clinical study design, clinical sampling and more targeted therapeutics. This ETN will internationalise participants, and leverage EC and industry sponsorship, to structure and expand the unique training programme and advance emerging research areas, combining wet-lab, clinical and Big Data resources with computational and modelling know-how. To achieve a paradigm shift in research training this ETN brings together international leaders in Preclinical Science & Molecular Medicine, Systems Analytics, and Targeted Therapeutics, from academia and industry. These experts are ideally positioned to develop the proposed training programme and deliver a highly-trained workforce of next generation scientists, with the right mind-set, knowledge and skills, at the interface of Translational and Systems Medicine. The TranSYS training programme is designed to address a critical skills gap that is currently a bottle neck to advancing Precision Medicine.