Institutional core facilities: prerequisite for breakthroughs in the life sciences

S cientific progress often goes hand in hand with technological advances and interdisciplinary research. Major breakthroughs in the life sciences, such as the deciphering of whole genomes, stem cell therapy or precision medicine, are the result of both new technologies and joint efforts of biologists, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists. Moreover, each of these accomplishments would not be possible without support infrastructures that provide specific technologies and expertise. Such high-end research infrastructures, which are often consolidated as core facilities, have helped to foster a collaborative research environment that is crucial for competitive interdisciplinary science and have become an integral part of life science research. The current third biomedical (r)evolution, manifested by the ever increasing speed of technological innovations, means that an individual researcher can no longer afford and master all state-of-the-art techniques. In the current life sciences ecosystem, core facilities are essential and the only means of providing cutting-edge technologies and expertise in an affordable manner. Based on our experience operating core facilities, we would like to go even further and take the core facility concept beyond single institutions towards institutional alliances. Providing and maintaining all technologies necessary for the interdisciplinary approaches employed by scientists at leading research institutes have become difficult to impossible at the institutional level. Research projects become more technologically challenging and more expensive. At the same time, technologies turn over ever faster, which imposes a financial burden on the institute and creates a need to find expert scientists to implement, run, improve and adjust those technologies to researchers’ needs. An institute has to focus on a few areas in which it will strive to be at the cutting edge and commit a continuous investment in order to stay there, but it also needs to guarantee access to other technological platforms that cannot be provided inhouse. With this in mind, Core for Life (www.coreforlife.eu) was established in 2012 as a strategic alliance between six institutes that have long-standing experience in running institutional core facilities to share technologies and to coordinate their investments. Sharing knowledge and expertise, conducting benchmarking studies and developing training curricula are further central activities of the alliance.