UK blueprints £75M hub to tackle bio data surge

Amid efforts to gain control of an overwhelming surge in life sciences data, the U.K. government is spending £75 million on what is being called a "nerve centre" of a Europe-wide effort to maintain and share digital bio data among researchers. The sizable investment bankrolls the construction of a central hub of the European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR) in Cambridge. And it comes amid plenty of grumbling in the scientific community about the need for resources to manage the skyrocketing amounts of data from such sources as DNA sequencing. Louise Leong, head of R&D at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, stated: "Without good access to such data, time and resources are wasted duplicating effort, which could be spent creating innovative new medicines." Article