BBMRI-ERIC’s 2024 Annual Report

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Looking back at a year of shared successes: the BBMRI-ERIC 2024 Annual Report

For 2024, BBMRI-ERIC continued its focus on the three overarching topics of sustainability, community and collaboration. You can or download the pdf here.

Completing the research infrastructure’s first decade of operation – BBMRI was granted the ERIC status in 2013 – provided a vital opportunity to highlight our community’s manifold contributions to the health and life sciences landscape.

Increasing sustainability

Activities in 2024 continued to build awareness of BBMRI-ERIC’s wide portfolio of scientific affairs in IT, Biobanking Development, Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications (ELSI) and Quality Management. This was underpinned by integral support provided by the functions of Finance and Project Management, Public Affairs, Outreach, Education and Communications and Central Office to provide support for the multitude of stakeholders.

2024 also marked mapping the future through the finalised BBMRI-ERIC 10-Year Roadmap 2025-2035. This visionary strategic guide was constructed through an unparalleled community and stakeholder co-creation process. We now go forth into the next decade with a revised vision, mission and eight strategic objectives building on the developments and services of the research infrastructure’s first decade of existence. At the heart of the Roadmap stands embracing the “One Health” approach to prioritise the interconnection between human, animal and environmental health.

Strengthening community

Our 10-Year Roadmap informed a new Work Programme 2025-2027 and development of this began in 2024 in partnership with the National Nodes, biobanks and Stakeholder Forum Patient Pillar. New and special emphasis was given on wider National Nodes and biobank engagement by incorporating their expertise as responsible leads of individual operational goals. This enables them to act as “champions” for the wider BBMRI-ERIC community.

Meanwhile, BBMRI-ERIC continuously fostered education, training and capacity building through BBMRI-ERIC’s Academy, including accredited online courses and webinars. The flagship event – in partnership with ESBB – was the relaunched Europe Biobank Week congress (EBW) as an in-person event in May 2024. This congress was attended by 653 participants from 38 countries representing citizens and patient organisations, clinicians, scientists and biobankers, policy makers and industry.

Leading collaboration

BBMRI-ERIC successfully continued its collaborations with scientific societies such as ESBB, EORTC, the Life Science Research Infrastructures and fellow ERICs. 2024 also saw the launch of new major projects coordinated by BBMRI-ERIC and its community including Integrate-LMedC with our National Node Director of Norway acting as the scientific coordinator. Key to strengthening the community and sustainability was the launch of the EvolveBBMRI project with specific emphasis on exploring new partnership models and datafication.

BBMRI-ERIC successfully piloted the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and substantially supported the building of the EOSC Federation by chairing the EOSC Health Data Task Force and applying as EOSC Node. In fact, BBMRI-ERIC was selected as one of the first 13 pioneering EOSC Nodes in February 2025 with its unique value proposition in the sensitive Health Data domain. This is based on BBMRI-ERIC’s long-standing federated access and analysis platform connecting around 500 biobanks and 25 National Nodes across 32 countries.

Get to know our National Nodes

A large section of the 2024 Annual report is dedicated to sharing highlights from all BBMRI-ERIC Member States, Observers and the IARC/WHO. You will learn about their key areas of expertise and remarkable achievements in 2024.

Highlights from our Headquarters

The BBMRI-ERIC Headquarters in Graz is home to collaborative departments that provide support and knowledge for the whole network. In our 2024 report we documented their key achievements and developments throughout the year.

You can or download the pdf here or read the full Annual report here as an interactive flipbook.