Solubility measurement is a standard test that is required for every chemical that is produced or tested. However, measuring solubility is a time/labour-intensive process that requires substantial quantities of chemicals. State-of-the-Art solubility measurements are either fast but inaccurate or slow but accurate and require excess of chemicals. FASS is based on high-efficiency second harmonic scattering that combines the analytical advantages of current solubility measurements, fast and accurate, while achieving cutting edge performance in sensitivity and reliability. FASS saves 90% of cost, 90% of measurement time, 99% of chemicals and 97% of electricity and 80% of compounds compared to the gold standard. As an optical light scattering technique, FASS is non-destructive, and combined with analytical advantages and sustainable use of chemicals and compounds, provides a disruptive innovation in solubility measurement. The consortium is composed of a dedicated startup to bring the instrument to market, a research and technology organization to support technology maturation, a European Research Consortium to enable customer development and instrument demonstration and a center for pharmaceutical research to explore value-added applications of FASS in drug discovery and development. The goals of the project are: 1) to develop a demonstrator with optimized and robust performance suited for instrument demonstration and application exploration. 2) to validate the technology with early adopters in early stage drug discovery and development and chemical synthesis companies. 3) to develop a feasible business model and go-to-market strategy to be implemented by the startup. FASS brings a sustainable solution to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, reduce chemical and electrical consumption, and through a dedicated startup, will create jobs, foster competition and contribute to the growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the European economy.

The RAFIKI consortium will support capacity building for early drug discovery in Africa with a focus on infectious diseases (e.g., malaria, tuberculosis). Sub-Saharan Africa is disproportionately burdened by such diseases yet lacks a critical mass of appropriately skilled scientists and access to general infrastructure, enabling technology platforms and expertise for drug discovery research. RAFIKI will leverage existing collaborations within the consortium to build the knowledge and technical capacities of research institutions across Africa. RAFIKI will establish regional training hubs in South, East and West Africa to support local capacity/skillset building for early-/mid-career researchers via bidirectional scientific training visits, mentorships, regional in-person workshops and online training courses. To establish the requisite infrastructure for future drug discovery R&I, knowledge and procedures will be shared for compound library curation at partner institutions (i.e., workflows, open database creation, library sharing capabilities), and data management capacities will be bolstered using the Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) Vault. To secure funding beyond the project lifetime, the consortium will liaise with relevant industrial actors and potential public/private funders.

Machine learning (ML) has enabled and accelerated frontier research in the life sciences, but democratised access to such methods is, unfortunately, not a given. Access to necessary hardware and software, knowledge and training, is limited, while methods are typically insufficiently documented and hard to find. Furthermore, even though modern AI-based methods typically generalize well to unseen data, no standard exists to enable sharing and fine-tuning of pretrained models between different analysis tools. Existing user-facing platforms operate entirely independently from each other, often failing to comply with FAIR data and Open Science standards. The field of AI and ML is developing at a staggering pace, making it impossible for the non-specialist to stay up to date. To enable the life science communities to benefit from AI/ML-powered image analysis methods, AI4LIFE will build bridges, providing urgently needed services on the common European research infrastructures. We will build an open, accessible, community-driven repository of FAIR pre-trained AI models and develop services to deliver these models to life scientists, including those without substantial computational expertise. Our direct support and ample training activities will prepare life scientists for responsible use of AI methods, while contributor services and open standards will drive community contributions of new models and interoperability between analysis tools. Open calls and public challenges will provide state-of-the-art solutions to yet unsolved image analysis problems in the life sciences. Our consortium brings together AI/ML researchers, developers of popular open source image analysis tools, providers of European-scale storage and compute services and European life sciences Research Infrastructures -- all united behind the common goal to enable life scientists to fully benefit from the untapped but potentially tremendous power of AI-based analysis methods.

The main objective of the EUREMAP consortium is to optimise the marine bioprospecting pipeline in Europe to enable state-of-the-art research and capacity for both academia and industry. The ambition is to leverage strengths available within European Research Infrastructures (RIs) and to align capacities and resources of the multidisciplinary field of marine bioprospecting. Hence, to increase the competitiveness of marine natural products in the field of drug discovery and to strengthen the blue bioeconomy in Europe, we will assemble a new pipeline that aligns and integrates the existing technical capacities and multidisciplinary expertise of the three European RIs - EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS), EMBRC and ELIXIR - in the field of marine natural products discovery. EUREMAP will develop a unique trans-RI integrated service in an European priority area, the blue economy. The pipeline will be an important part of the European blue growth strategy to stimulate economic growth through innovations in marine biotechnology. The potential for innovations and value creation in the blue biotechnology sector is high, and the sector is characterised by being multidisciplinary, knowledge-intensive and built on technology. Building a new European transnational RI service platform to support the competitiveness of an academic and industrial community in all aspects of this multidisciplinary field. EUREMAP will bring together an experienced, multidisciplinary consortium across three RIs to support and enable the discovery of novel bioactive natural products from marine organisms by utilizing novel technology to improve the capacity of European RIs.

European and global research infrastructures (RIs) provide facilities and resources to support excellence and innovation, delivering socio-economic value by raising skills, advancing knowledge and technology and its exploitation, and driving new development and construction. RIs closely engage with their specialist communities but RI sustainability in the long term requires engagement with civil communities and stakeholders where an understanding of the significance and the socio-economic benefits of the services delivered underpins financial and strategic support. RI-VIS will increase the visibility of European RIs to broader scientific communities, industry and strategic partners in third countries. The RI-VIS consortium has main membership from the life sciences RIs where there is urgent need to improve outreach and strategic partnerships. Partner RIs in other thematic groups ensure that outcomes are relevant to all. A major advantage of this consortium is first hand knowledge of RI services and operating processes and their user communities. RI-VIS will target communities and stakeholders with current and precise information and match them with RIs to facilitate i) the development of new collaborations, ii) user accessibility, iii) collaborative and innovative actions, iv) funding opportunities, v) knowledge transfer and vi) training opportunities. RI-VIS will make it easier for new entrants to find out how RIs are organized and funded, where and how to access RI services and where data is available. The communication framework will include several digital platforms to achieve broad reach and generate a communication toolkit to help others benefit from the experiences gained. RI-VIS will broker engagement of RIs with various stakeholder groups using events and thematic workshops. A collaboration toolkit will identify best engagement strategies to bring new agreements to fruition. RI-VIS will mentor a selection of partnerships to broker cooperation agreements.