Great news! Biocenter Finland has received the prestigious “Lighthouse” status in Finland’s national roadmap for research infrastructures (FIRI) 2025–2028. Also, our joint consortium of six universities has received total of 17.5 Million euros funding for 2025-2029. Lighthouses were nominated for the first time by the Research Council of Finland. According to the criteria, the lighthouse infrastructures are at the forefront of the national infrastructure roadmap in all key infrastructure areas, such as service provision, impact, functionality and interoperability.
The funding now granted will strengthen life sciences technology platforms and the nationwide open access service network for national and international researchers, health care providers as well as companies.
”Environmental change, biodiversity loss, pandemics and other serious health-related issues highlight the importance of life sciences as producers of knowledge and solutions. Recent technological and digital developments have created completely new opportunities to generate knowledge and applications to address these global challenges but also places increasing demands on state-of-the-art research infrastructures in terms of equipment, data and personnel’s expertise,” says Professor Olli Silvennoinen, Director of Biocenter Finland.
”The now funded Biocenter Finland’s project ”From Data to Innovations and Beyond” responds to the aforementioned developments in technologies and digital data analysis and provides critical instrument updates in 13 technology areas. The consortium’s project will be implemented in all member universities around Finland. For the first time national funding is also allocated for personnel resources for AI-driven digital data analysis,” Silvennoinen continues.
”The funding supports strategic priorities and has an impact on Finland’s competitiveness to conduct world-class research and attract new experts and investments. Our technology platforms also offer testing and development environments for commercializing innovations and are very important for Finnish companies in the health and biotechnology sectors” concludes Silvennoinen.
Biocenter Finland is a nationwide Life Sciences research infrastructure organization owned by six Finnish universities. It’s technology platforms cover key technologies in life sciences and biomedical research and provide open access services and training annually to over 3000 user groups from academia, healthcare, health and environmental safety, and companies across Finland. Biocenter Finland is considered an international forerunner for the coordination and strategic use of financial and human resources across the entire discipline.
Four of the Biocenter Finland technology platforms; Biological Imaging, Real-time Imaging, Drug Discovery and Chemical Biology, and Structural Biology are affiliated to the following corsortia also selected on the (FIRI) roadmap: Euro-BioImaging Finland, European Infrastructure of Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology EU-OS Finland (EU-OS FI), and Integrated Structural Biology Infrastructure Instruct-ERIC Centre Finland (Consortium FINStruct and Instruct FI). Euro-BioImaging Finland also received the lighthouse status.
