Annual Scientific Report 2015

Industry Programme
The EMBL-EBI Industry Programme has been an important and vibrant part
of EMBL-EBI since 1996, providing regular contact with commercial users and
informing them of the institute’s future directions.
EMBL-EBI interacts with industry in many ways.
We support pre-competitive collaboration through a
subscription-based programme that welcomes larger
companies making use of the data and resources
provided by EMBL-EBI. Member companies represent
primarily the pharmaceutical sector but also the
agri-food, nutrition, healthcare and consumer goods
industries. The programme provides quarterly strategy
meetings, expert-level workshops on topics prioritised
by the members and other forms of communication
including webinars and face-to-face meetings.
A separate set of activities supports SMEs through
outreach activities organised at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton
and internationally in coordination with the EMBL
International Relations dept. Our programme also
serves as an interface between EMBL-EBI industryfocussed
initiatives and organisations including the
Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the Pistoia
Alliance, the Clinical Data Interchange Standards
Consortium (CDISC) and others.
Major achievements
Our well-attended quarterly strategy meetings provided
opportunities for members to learn first-hand about
emerging developments at EMBL-EBI and to prioritise
future activities, including knowledge-exchange
workshops (see Table). In 2015 we ran nine of these
workshops, which are a major benefit of membership:
seven were held at EMBL-EBI, one in Cambridge,
Massachusetts at the Genzyme Centre and one
in Waltham, MA hosted by AstraZeneca. The
US-held workshops had very high levels of
participation, and served to extend the reach
of the Industry Programme to member
companies whose discovery activities
are primarily in the US. The Sanofi
(Genzyme)-hosted workshop
covered Immunogenomics, and
the AstraZeneca-hosted event
focused on Translational
NextGen Sequencing.
We were very pleased to welcome Astex
Pharmaceuticals, part of Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, as
a new member of the Industry Programme in
December 2015.
In March 2015, we ran our annual event for small
and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): the SME
Bioinformatics Forum. This was jointly organised
with One Nucleus, a membership organisation for
life-science and healthcare companies based in
Cambridge and London, the heart of Europe’s largest
life science and healthcare cluster, and with the support
of the Council of European Bioregions (CEBR) and
UK Trade and Investment. We hosted, jointly with
InnovateUK, a workshop on integrated ‘omics, in
advance of an InnovateUK funding round. Our third
SME outreach event in 2015, also organised with One
Nucleus, was the ON Helix Welcome Reception and
BioNewsRound Award.
In collaboration with the Argentine Ministry of Science,
Technology and Productive Innovation (MINCYT) and
the Argentine Chamber of Biotechnology (CAB), we
organised a two-day workshop in Argentina, EMBL’s
newest associate member state. The event focussed
on applications of bioinformatics and genomics in
healthcare, agriculture and livestock breeding.
151
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report