EOSC-ENTRUST

Funding programme: Horizon Europe (N 101131056)

Budget: EU contribution of €4.2M and €0.76M from the UK Research and Innovation

Coordinator: EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY LABORATORY (EMBL) 

Duration: 3 years (March 2024 - February 2027) 

EOSC-ENTRUST aims to create a European network of Trusted Research Environments (TRE) for sensitive data and to drive European interoperability by joint development of a common blueprint for federated data access and analysis to support the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Countries and institutions have made significant investments in secure and trusted data environments to meet the need for research and policy-driven analysis of sensitive datasets such as people's health and socio-economic status, the habitats of vulnerable species and geo-spatial locations of protected sites. There are now many such secure environments in operation - linked to national centres, individual organisations or specific research communities. This fragmented landscape poses challenges for both users and providers: researchers are faced with many different systems and access procedures; providers need to manage federated access across multiple, potentially incompatible, technology and governance frameworks. EOSC-ENTRUST brings together providers of operational TREs from 15 European countries with a shared goal to implement, validate and promote their capabilities through a common European framework using shared standards and common legal, operational and technical language. EOSC-ENTRUST has identified four driver use cases covering Genomics, Clinical trials, Social science, and public-private partnerships to benchmark capabilities, inform blueprint design and demonstrate secure data analysis using federated workflows. 

ECRIN’s role in EOSC-ENTRUST 

ECRIN has partnered with the University of Oslo (UiO) to design and operate a TRE adapted to the specific needs of the clinical research community and aiming to promote clinical research data sharing and reuse. This TRE will serve as a driver use case for establishing minimum requirements for clinical research data sharing (legal, operational, technical) and exploring interoperability requirements across different TREs that focus on clinical research and health. In collaboration with Health Data Research (HDR) UK, ECRIN will provide prerequisites for using routinely collected health data in clinical research.