Convenzione

The Convenzione signed on December 30, 2020 between the Ministries of Economy and Finance, of Health and of University and Research and the Human Technopole Foundation governs the realization at Human Technopole of National Facilities (NFs), which must meet the definition of research infrastructure adopted by the European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)^[1], i.e., facilities, resources and related services used by the scientific community to conduct high-quality research in their respective fields, independent of institutional or national affiliation.

The Convenzione provides that these NFs will be identified following a public consultation in two phases: the first engaging stakeholders representing Universities, research hospitals, Public Research Institutions, Industry, Regions, social partners, and Third Sector (charitable) entities that conduct or fund research in the life sciences, the second phase consists in collecting the views and comments of  the entire scientific community on a summary of possible NFs elaborated by the Technical Committee, based on the output of the first phase.

On September 30^th 2021, the first level consultation was completed. This consultation involved more than 160 stakeholders and aimed to identify the priorities of the national scientific community in terms of research infrastructures (RIs) in the field of life sciences.

Several technological facilities proposed by the participants in aggregate or individual forms were compliant with the requirements set out in the Convenzione. These proposals were further examined by the Technical Committee, taking into consideration the advice of international experts in the technological areas covered by the proposed facilities. The most important criteria were whether substantial overlap existed with National and/or European RIs, as well as with current or planned National public investments in RIs, and the magnitude of the proportion of the national scientific community potentially interested by the proposed facilities.

Overall, this first phase of consultation allowed the identification of ‘core areas’ with high demand for NFs providing access to researchers in the respective fields: 1. the OMICS domain – including genomics, single cell technologies, proteomics and metabolomics, and genome engineering; 2. the IMAGING domain – including molecular, cellular, and tissue imaging, structural biology and cryo-electron microscopy techniques; 3. the DATA HANDLING AND ANALYSIS core – which will support the two domains above including data pipeline design, first line data analysis, data storage and data sharing with the NF users and, based on demand, creating data resources for the community.

The results of the first level consultation were submitted to the national scientific community, which was invited to express its opinion on the identified core areas and to propose any motivated additions and/or deletions. The second level consultation, that was open from the 19^th of April to the 31^st of May 2022, confirmed that the access to the identified technologies/services was considered very important by a high proportion of the participating researchers. In fact, of the 1624 participants, 91%, 87% and 88%, respectively, indicated that the implementation of these three areas is a very high or high priority, confirming the strong demand for these services. In particular, 65% of the participants deems the offer of OMICS services a very high priority, followed by DATA HANDLING AND ANALYSIS and IMAGING with 56% and 53% of the contributors identifying them as very high priority, respectively.

A detailed description of the process and outcome of the two-stage consultation as well as the recommendations of the Technical Committee are illustrated in the Final Report, available at this link. [Please note that the file shall be opened using Adobe Reader in order to access the documents and relevant appendices (only available in English)].