Funding at the EBI

EBI Funding (€)

Our main sources of funding are:

The EMBL-EBI attracted over €30 million in internal and external funding for 2006. The global importance of our work is reflected in the fact that we attracted 50% of our funds from external sources, including some beyond Europe. As part of EMBL, the largest part of our funding (generally 40-50%) comes from the governments of EMBL’s member states. Other major funders include the European Commission, Wellcome Trust, US National Institutes of Health, UK research councils and our industry partners. The UK Research Councils have also provided substantial funding  towards the extension to the EBI building. We thank all our funders for allowing us to continue and expand our work.

EMBL - Our parent organization provides approximately 50% of our funds. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory provides funding for all our research groups, as well as our systems, external services, database applications, administration and other support. EMBL also provides support for our core databases.

Commission of the European Union - Funds ~20% of our activities, through several different contracts including:

• BioSapiens aims to address the current fragmentation of European bioinformatics by creating a virtual research institute for genome annotation and by organizing a European school for training in genome annotation.
• EMBRACE will standardize access to bioinformatics resources, enabling data providers to provide well-defined interfaces to their databases that will conform to the same standards. This will allow users to make the most of dispersed data resources.
• ENFIN brings together experimentalists and computational biologists to develop the next generation of informatics resources for systems biology.
• The FELICS integrated infrastructure initiative aims to organize and release a complete range of biomolecular information upon which European life-science research depends.

US National Institutes of Health - contributes funds to UniProt, the Gene Ontology (GO) project at the EBI, and Reactome. We also have US funding for several research projects.

Wellcome Trust - Funds the Ensembl and MSD databases as well as several research projects. In addition, the Trust supports us by providing our premises on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus and has provided substantial funding towards an extension to the EBI building.

The UK research councils - The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) makes a major contribution towards funding research at the EBI, providing support for several postdoctoral fellows and students. The Medical Research Council (MRC) funds several service and research projects. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the BBSRC fund grid-based projects at the EBI. These aim to provide access to distributed computing resources for bioinformatics, allowing information sharing and co-operative working.

EBI Industry Programme - Several of the world's leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology and consumer-goods companies support the EBI through its Industry Programme. This allows industry to quickly adapt to, and maximize the benefit from, innovations in bioinformatics through training, research, and the development and adaptation of bioinformatics resources that are particularly relevant to industry.