Annual Scientific Report 2015

awareness amongst some of our strongest supporters
that our research, services and training have an impact
on all the life sciences, including explorations of
unknown life in the world’s oceans and soil.
Industry, innovation and translation
Originally formed by GSK, the Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute and EMBL-EBI, Open Targets (formerly
the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation, CTTV)
fosters deep, on-going interactions between academic
and industry members. Its purpose is to develop open,
transformative approaches to selecting and validating
novel targets in drug development. In 2015 the
partnership launched the Target Validation platform,
helping scientists discover and prioritise evidence-based
relationships between targets and diseases. At its launch
the service provided evidence for over 21 800 potential
therapeutic targets spanning more than 8800 diseases
and phenotypes. The design of this comprehensive data
service was based on user-experience research, ensuring
it is fit for purpose for wet- and dry-lab scientists alike,
and in its first six weeks had over 9000 visits.
served over 70 million requests in 2015. Every month,
the EMBL-EBI domain handled over 560 million
requests and delivered over 12.6 million ‘jobs’ for
our users.
Genes, genomes and variation
The rapid, early sharing of pathogen surveillance
data and related information is crucial during disease
outbreaks, and in 2015 the European Nucleotide Archive
(ENA) facilitated such sharing in the EU-funded
COMPARE project by developing new ‘Data Hubs’ and
establishing a cloud-compute environment. These and
future developments will make it easier for researchers
to track and rapidly share information about viruses
such as Ebola and Zika.
EBI Metagenomics, which contains sequencing data
from environmental samples, grew by leaps and bounds
in 2015, perhaps most notably with the addition of
datasets from the EMBL-led Tara Oceans expedition.
Following the interim directorship of Ewan Birney,
Jeffrey Barrett of the Sanger Institute was appointed
Director of the partnership in 2015. In all, 60 EMBL-EBI
staff now work on some 30 Open Targets projects,
which range from computational pipelines to oncology,
induced-pluripotent stem cells and single-cell genomics.
We were very pleased to welcome Astex
Pharmaceuticals, part of Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, as a
new member of the Industry Programme in December
2015. Our Programme provides neutral ground for
bioinformatics specialists in 22 large companies to meet
and address shared challenges.
CERN openlab, a unique public–private partnership
between CERN and leading ICT companies,
welcomed EMBL-EBI as one of its first public-sector
members. CERN openlab’s mission is to accelerate the
development of innovative ICT solutions that help the
increasingly data-driven scientific community.
Services
New technologies are enabling the generation of vast
quantities of data in publicly funded research, and most
funders require these outputs to be made available in
public data repositories such as those at EMBL-EBI.
Our storage capacity has grown steadily, but the growth
in nucleotide and proteomics data generation has been
dramatic. Compression techniques such as CRAM,
which was rolled out for all depositors in 2015, resolve
the issue of handling nucleotide data on a very large
scale, and we continue to work on novel methods
of compression.
The use of our resources has grown rapidly as well: to
take just one example, the Ensembl REST API alone
Invitation to an event for policymakers and funders on board the
research schooner Tara in London, 2015.
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 5