BBMRI-ERIC enters production as part of the EOSC Federation

BBMRI-ERIC has entered production as part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation, marking the transition from developing and prototyping the Node to delivering operational services and resources for researchers. This moment marks the culmination of a decade of European, national and organisational investment in the development of EOSC.

As the biomedical and sensitive health data EOSC Node, BBMRI-ERIC integrates Europe’s biobanks and biomolecular resources into the EOSC Federation. It provides GDPR-compliant, FAIR access to biosamples, genomic, imaging and clinical data across ~500 biobanks from 28 Member and Observer countries plus the global organisation IARC/WHO. Through the Federation, these resources can be discovered and used alongside complementary capabilities provided by other EOSC Nodes across Europe.

The EOSC Federation as a whole will mark the entrance into its operational phase at the EOSC Symposium 2026 in Florence on 14–16 October. The EOSC EU Node and the Federation’s 27 national, thematic and e-infrastructure Nodes – supported by 218 European research organisations – are creating a distributed European research environment in which data, services and computing resources can be used across institutional, disciplinary and national boundaries. This month’s transition into operations ushers in a growth phase for the Federation that will see an expansion of Nodes, data and services year over year.

From infrastructure to science

The Federation is designed to make high-quality research data and services easier to find, access and reuse while supporting FAIR and open science, provenance, security and trusted access. Across EOSC, ongoing scientific use cases already span areas including climate and marine science, infectious-disease surveillance, cancer research, advanced imaging and AI-supported discovery.

One such use case, the Multi-centric validation of AI models for prostate-cancer screening (MCVAL) was coordinated by BBMRI-ERIC and aims to create a secure environment in which AI models for prostate cancer screening can be validated using data from different hospitals.

Rather than building new diagnostic systems from scratch, the project focuses on testing an existing model trained on whole-slide images and assessing how well it performs when applied to data processed elsewhere. The EOSC Federation is central to the project, as it enables collaboration across a wider group of experts and provides access to computing resources and additional data sources that would not otherwise be available.

A growing European research capability

EOSC embodies an important European approach to research-data governance designed to counter global pressures on European data sovereignty. This is achieved through distributed ownership, institutional autonomy, interoperability and cooperation under shared rules.

Within this proven framework, BBMRI-ERIC will continue to improve its services for researchers, expand the resources available through the Federation and develop new connections with scientific communities and other Nodes.