In June 2021 Charité joined EBRAINS as an associate member, giving it an opportunity to co-design the future iterations of the infrastructure’s cutting-edge tools and services. Together with the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), Charité is contributing the infrastructure of the simulation platform The Virtual Brain led by Professor Petra Ritter. The Virtual Brain is a “learning” computer model of the human brain: Data from radiological images, electrical brain measurements, digital atlases and molecular biological databases are fed into the model, which is refined with the integration of each new data set. Personalized simulations with data from individual patients predict the effects of drugs or allow precise diagnostics. “Clinical validation studies are planned to test how well the applications can be incorporated into medical decisions that benefit patients. “We are delighted that by being included in the ESFRI Roadmap our research will be accessible throughout Europe to the broad scientific community,” says Prof. Petra Ritter, a BIH Professor who heads the Brain Simulation Section at the BIH and is a member of the Department of Neurology with Experimental Neurology at Charité. “Creating new clinical applications is hard work. It is a long and laborious process from innovation to validation to patient. EBRAINS can aid this process by providing digital infrastructure that enables reproducible research on a large scale.”
The first research infrastructure of its kind worldwide, EBRAINS – part of the Human Brain Project under the scientific leadership of Forschungszentrum Jülich – provides access via a web portal to the most comprehensive database on the human brain to date, as well as to powerful digital tools like brain simulations or Big Data analyses. More than 500 scientists at over 130 European partner institutions from 19 countries are involved in developing EBRAINS. The aim is to promote scientific collaboration across national borders and to enable international cutting-edge research.
Links
Press release by Forschungszentrum Jülich on 1 July 2021:
https://www.fz-juelich.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/UK/EN/2021/2021-07-01-ebrains-in-esfri-en.html
EBRAINS website: https://ebrains.eu/