Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

The INTEGRATE-LMedC consortium will develop a new concept to guide and support decision-making for the next-generation research infrastructure (RI) to facilitate efficient utilization and harmonization of large medical cohorts (LMedC), and to accelerate scientific and medical breakthroughs in Europe and beyond. Achievement of the ambitious objectives will only be possible through the integration of 11 highly interdisciplinary partners including established ERIC / ESFRI infrastructures such BBMRI, ECRIN, EIRENE and EBRAINS with unique expertise in conceptualizing and implementing European RIs. The partners will generate a gap analysis to identify what is missing of cohort data and samples, RI tools and services, quality measures, governance models, user needs and the barriers for efficient utilization of these cohorts and RI, including ethical and legal frameworks. To identify IT technologies and architecture for suitable data stewardship and long-term availability of European RIs, the partners will prepare for a feasibility study for federated data analysis of LMedC. The feasibility study will be based on two examples of use-cases: one stroke case using data from medical health registry data and one case using data from longitudinal population-based studies with different technical, legal, and ethical challenges. To ensure availability of data and samples related to existing and future LMedC studies and their re-use for secondary research, the partners will develop a concept outline including a governance plan and guiding principles for data access policies and data protection policy, whilst considering the FAIR principles and ELSI issues. An overarching RI concept to manage, integrate, and sustain LMedC studies will be developed, including an initial financial and operational plan for the implementation of the new RI outlining new services and access opportunities for the research community.

In the EU, about 165 million people are affected each year by mental disorders, and estimates indicate that mental disorders will become the number 1 economic cost factor in medicine in 2030. Schizophrenia alone affects approximately 1% of the world's population. The clinical effectiveness of the antipsychotics on the market remains limited with 30 to 50% of schizophrenic patients showing an insufficient response to treatment. Several factors, from genetic to psychological and social, may lie behind poor treatment outcomes or side effects and varies from patient to patient. Therefore, the central aim of the VIRTUAL BRAIN TWIN project is to create an ecosystem for generating virtual brain twins for psychiatric patients, by leveraging the consortium’s detailed knowledge and expertise in neuronal microcircuit simulation, mathematical analysis, innovative AI tools, and psychiatric care and clinical studies. This ecosystem will guide clinicians to optimise medication type and dosage, and to evaluate alternative treatments, such as brain stimulation and lifestyle changes. Multiscale cause-effect simulations and virtual brain simulations based on fMRI or sMRI data from the individual patient, will bridge the gap between molecules and the patient's brain. At the centre of this ecosystem will be the Virtual Brain Twin platform, which will make use of big data, multiscale modelling, and high-performance computing (HPC) that will be secured by appropriate data safety and protection. The platform will be embedded in the European digital neuroscience research infrastructure EBRAINS and will be initially accessible to neuroscientists, clinical researchers, and mathematical modellers, and in the future, to clinicians, and patients as well. This ground-breaking project will pave the way for personalised treatment of psychiatric disorders, with the potential to significantly improve the quality of life of patients suffering from these conditions.

Stroke-caused cognitive and neuromotor impairment is currently an increasing burden: post-stroke deficits are commonly believed to be treated with rehabilitation. Direct medical costs of stroke are stimated to increase up to 94.3 billion USD only in US. The indirect costs, including non-healthcare costs, are estimated at 15.9 billion. The journey towards recovery includes several stages, from hospitalization to in-patient and out-patient rehabilitation and the subsequent return to home. Not everyone has access to rehabilitation programs, and the gains of them tend to deteriorate after hospital discharge. Focused stroke rehabilitation reduces long-term disability and the economic burden of stroke and supports prevention by lessening modifiable risks. The objective of PHRASE (Personalised Health cognitive assistance for RehAbilitation SystEm) is to create a workflow that integrates the best available scientific knowledge and obtain an efficient prognosis and intervention protocols for stroke and other brain-related diseases. It will not only allow to treat stroke-caused impairments better and more efficiently, but also it is a potential treatment for other neurological diseases like dementia, aphasia and PSCI, depression or multiple sclerosis. Eodyne's PHRASE will be based on RGS previous technology, developing its Technology Readiness Level. The present consortium brings together a comprehensive group of highly qualified experts. So that Eodyne can successfully produce prognosis and intervention individualized protocols, EBRAINS will be the brain database and Charité will provide with its brain models for the combination of data brain. SPECS-Lab will bring its knowledge in cognitive rehabilitation and will act as clinical coordinator, while Saddlepoint Science brings the expertise to implement the AI tools for continuous improvement of the intervention protocols.

The Coordination and Support Action (CSA) BrainHealth will lay the ground for an envisaged ‘European Partnership (EP) on Brain Health’. Twenty participants from 11 Member and Associated States and Third countries will jointly pursue the work plan. The overall objective of the CSA is to sizeably contribute to maintenance and restoration of brain health for citizens in Europe and worldwide. Specifically, the project aims to design a collaboration framework for the EP as an umbrella for existing initiatives and stakeholder communities in this area. The CSA will create a common understanding of achievements, gaps and future developments in European research into brain health, and derive from them priorities and opportunities in a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). Intense consultation with representatives of Member and Associated States is expected to lead to adoption of the SRIA and development of an implementation plan that will allow for strategic alignment of regional and national research programmes and commitments to the EP. Research infrastructures and platforms will be analysed regarding their service opportunities, and solutions will be developed to facilitate data and material sharing in the area of brain health. For highest possible impact, the CSA will reach out to the most relevant globally acting initiatives and their brain research strategies and policies. Synergies will be identified to shape the international landscape and establish new while maintaining existing collaboration. Finally, the CSA activities will be embedded in thoroughly planned dissemination and communication activities and an efficient management structure.