ELIXIR Finland: 10 years of connecting Finnish life sciences to Europe

Life science research, such as understanding rare diseases or studying the effects of climate change, requires enormous amounts of data and advanced tools to manage and analyze that data. That’s why ELIXIR Finland was created: to build a unified infrastructure that provides researchers in Finland easy access to these critical resources. Now, ELIXIR Finland celebrates a significant milestone – a decade of advancing life science research in Finland.

Hosted by CSC – IT Center for Science, ELIXIR Finland supports Finnish life science researchers by providing access to essential databases, software tools, training materials, and connecting them to supercomputing resources available across Europe. 

ELIXIR Finland’s journey began in 2013, when the state of Finland signed the Consortium Agreement to join ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science data. By officially becoming a member in 2014, Finland became the 11th country to participate in the ambitious European initiative and entered the global life sciences and bioinformatics landscape. Today, this membership enables Finnish researchers to collaborate with over 240 research institutes across 22 European countries.

In 10 years, ELIXIR Finland has driven progress and impact in Finnish life sciences e.g. in the following ways:

• Participated in more than 50 EU projects, driving research collaboration
• Supported Finnish researchers with the expertise of 160+ CSC specialists
• Since 2019, secured €13.7 million in international funding to drive innovation in life sciences

“The impact of ELIXIR Finland has been intense. In 2014, CSC was working with only tens of computing projects in health and biological sciences. Now, we support over 1,600 research projects with our computing infrastructure. The field is still growing, so in five years’ time we expect to more than double the amount of projects through our European collaborations,” says Tommi Nyrönen, Director of ELIXIR Finland at CSC.
Milestones in ELIXIR Finland’s journey

A game-changer in secure cloud services

From the beginning, ELIXIR Finland has worked closely with the life science community to develop services for their needs. In the early 2000s, cloud services were rapidly evolving. CSC launched its first community cloud service in 2013. It quickly became evident that life science researchers needed a secure cloud service to analyze sensitive human data.

This led to the development of ePouta, a secure cloud service designed with data protection as a top priority. It allows researchers to access resources through a secure network connection, either using dedicated fiber optic links or VPN-like technologies. This added a level of security while making it easier for organizations to use cloud resources, as they were integrated into their own networks.

Looking back, ePouta has been a game-changer, enabling researchers to access cloud resources on their own and ensuring that sensitive data can be securely processed. This development work on security laid the foundation for future customer collaboration, such as development of Findata’s and Statistics Finland’s secure processing environments.

Transforming data access management

Early on, CSC recognized the importance of reliable authorization tools to manage sensitive data. The need for such tools became evident when THL Biobank, a part of Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare,  sought a more efficient way to control access to their research data. In response, CSC and ELIXIR Finland developed the Resource Entitlement Management System (REMS), which streamlines data access management and helps make data available for reuse.

REMS is a fully electronic system that handles data access applications, records decisions, and issues machine-readable permissions. Its flexibility and security have made it widely adopted not only in Finland but also internationally, including in Australia. Originally designed to manage research data access, REMS has expanded, now also facilitating tasks like ordering death certificates from Statistics Finland, and integrating software into secure environments.

In line with ELIXIR Finland’s commitment to open standards, REMS supports global data access management standards and is freely available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. This has enabled quick adaptation to regulations like the Finnish Act on the Secondary Use of Health and Social Data, as well as supporting large-scale international collaborations such as the European 1+ Million Genomes initiative.

Advancing secure data management

CSC’s Sensitive Data Services began as a Nordic project to improve the secure management and exchange of sensitive biomedical data across borders. This collaboration, known as NeIC Tryggve project, led to two important insights: the need for a service to store biomedical data while ensuring it remains within national borders, and the development of a new service, alongside ePouta, to manage sensitive data securely.

The Nordic collaboration quickly demonstrated the potential of securely transferring, storing, and accessing data. The decade’s work was realized in 2019 when video files stored in Finland and Sweden were accessed remotely from Oslo, Norway, using a mobile phone, all within a secure environment on ePouta.

Today, CSC’s Sensitive Data Services have evolved into a trusted platform for secure data management. From early prototypes to the fully operational services available today, ELIXIR Finland’s support and networks have been critical in shaping the vision and capabilities of Sensitive Data Services. One of the most recent developments within this platform is FEGA (Federated EGA), a service developed in collaboration with the ELIXIR network and specifically tailored for sensitive biomedical research data. By leveraging a federated infrastructure, FEGA allows genomic datasets to remain under the control of local institutions while still being accessible for collaborative research. 

This article was first published on 29 January by CSC.