Annual Scientific Report 2015

Industry workshops
• In silico ADMET prediction
• Immunogenomics
• Translational NGS
• Enabling the translational bioinformatician
• Quantitative systems pharmacology
• Data enhancement through scientific literature: integrating
the literature with data to enable discovery
• The EMBL-EBI RDF Platform
• Electronic Medical Records for Drug Discovery:
• Connectivity Map and LINCS (organised in association
with The Broad Institute)
Supporting companies of all sizes
Our collaborations are international, interdisciplinary
and cross-sector in scope. Ten of our scholarly
publications in 2015 were in collaboration with
companies, and we worked with industry on a range of
projects, for example expanding and improving mapping
to the Gene Ontology with F. Hoffmann-La Roche.
Our service teams worked on several innovative projects
with SMEs. The PDBe Content and Integration and
Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies teams collaborated
with Flax on the BioSolr project, which aims to advance
technologies to explore biomedical data in open-source
software. Our Literature Services team collaborated
with Publons, making it easier for authors to take credit
for their work, and with Kudos, a company offering lay
descriptions of research articles.
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45% of users
said they could not have
neither have created/
collected the last data
they used themselves, nor
obtained it elsewhere
T
£335m/year
EMBL-EBI data and
services directly
underpinned an estimated
£335m of research last
year or £2.5b over 30
years(NPV)
)
£920m/year
EMBL-EBI data and
services contributed to the
wider realisation of future
research impacts worth
£920m annually or £6.9b
over 30 years (NPV)
D
£1bn to £5bn
Direct efficiency impact
of EMBL-EBI data,
representing direct worth
of between £5,382 to
£26,000 per user
per annum
Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies,
delivering the keynote address at BioBeat15, Translating genomics into
biobusiness: Defining the “Why Now?”
Making connections
In 2015 we co-organised the BioBeat conference:
“Translating Genomics Into Biomedicine” - a major
event featuring Innovate UK Chief Executive Ruth
McKernan, Chief Medical Officer for England Sally
Davies and over a dozen leaders in biobusiness. Enabled
by BioBeat and the Wellcome Genome Campus Sex in
Science Programme, the event attracted 300 attendees.
We co-organised the Cambridge New Therapeutics
Forum, a bimonthly networking event that attracts over
100 attendees, and co-organised a workshop for SMEs
with InnovateUK on integrated ‘omics. Our Industry
Programme and OneNucleus also jointly organised the
annual SME Bioinformatics Forum, which showcases
our services in the context of innovations by local
companies.
Impact
In 2015 our newly formed Strategic Project Management
Office worked with an external management
consultancy, Charles Beagrie Ltd., to facilitate a
large-scale, economic analysis of the institute’s impact
on research practice and the global economy. This work,
encouraged by the BBSRC, fed into a new framework for
impact assessment. The report included a survey of over
4000 data service users, 45% of whom indicated that
they could neither have created nor collected the last
data they used themselves, nor obtained it elsewhere.
The findings demonstrate the vital role of public
databases in life-science and biomedical research, and
indicate that for every million invested in EMBL-EBI,
roughly 20 million is returned to the global economy.
NPV, net present value. Figures are from an
external assessment of EMBL-EBI services
undertaken in 2015.
See http://bit.ly/embl-ebi-impact
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 41