Palazzo Italia, incubator labs and Tree of Life at the Human Technopole site in Milan. Credit: Human Technopole.
A two-month public consultation that involved representatives of universities and research institutes has resulted in a list of proposals for new research facilities on life sciences to be built in Milan, to which all Italian scientists would be able to access. Scientists contacted by Nature Italy welcome these shared facilities, as well as the process by which they are being selected. But it is still unclear how long they will take to build.
The facilities are described in a Convention signed at the end of 2020 by the ministries of University and Research, Health and Economy, and the Human Technopole (HT) Foundation. Based in Milan, HT was launched in 2015 as a research institute focused on genomics, big data, ageing, and nutrition, aiming to host up to 1,600 researchers. At the time, the Italian government decided to allocate €150 million annually for 10 years to the hub, amid criticisms by scientists who claimed a lack of transparency and consultation in the process.
The new convention gives HT, led since 2019 by former Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Iain Mattaj, the additional mission of building National Platforms (NPs) open to the whole national scientific community, using 55% of the centre’s annual budget.
Each platform will include state-of-the-art technologies, materials and specialized staff, that Italian scientists from any institution will be able to use for their own experiments. When fully functional, the NPs will count on €77 million per year for operation. A similar model is used for the SciLifeLab in Stockholm, launched in 2010. Its genomics infrastructure offers large-scale DNA-sequence data generation and analysis, and is accessible to scientists across the country.
The actual list of the Italian platforms will be decided through a two-phase consultation. In the first phase, that lasted from 23 July to 30 September, a questionnaire was sent out to representatives of more than 160 institutions involved in life sciences research, such as universities, Scientific Institutes for Research and Care (IRCCS), public research organisations, and the Italian members of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).
During the process, over 90 institutions including most of the IRCCS agreed to jointly propose a list of ten platforms on genomics and sequencing, single-cell omics, vector and cell engineering, human imaging, animal imaging, cellular and molecular imaging, metabolomics and proteomics, bioinformatics, drug discovery and development, and structural biology. Additional proposals may arrive from the other institutions involved.
Fabrizio Tagliavini from the IRCCS Foundation Carlo Besta Neurological Institute, Milan, who has coordinated the IRCCS network during the consultation, says the process marks a change of pace for Italian research and represents a model for public investments, because it is based on the principle that funds should be assigned after a transparent discussion with experts in the field.
A technical committee will now analyse all proposals and then launch a second-level consultation, where the whole Italian scientific community will have a chance to propose changes or additions to the list. In the end, the committee will define a priority list of platforms to be built at Human Technopole’s premises in Milan.
Once the platforms are in place, access to them will be continuous through the year and allocated on a competitive basis. An eight-member independent panel will evaluate requests based on the scientific quality of the project, and the costs of the experiments will be covered by the platforms’ own budget.
“The platforms will be of all and for all” says Elena Cattaneo, a stem-cell scientist and senator for life, who calls the process “regulated, transparent and unprecedented in the country” and would like to see young and older researchers have the same right of competitive access to the NPs to carry out their projects, regardless of their affiliation. “All this without taking resources from the HT Foundation” she adds.
“This €77 million per year for common platforms, together with the €11.7 billion from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, may represent a turning point for Italian research,” says Gennaro Ciliberto, Professor of Molecular Biology at Istituto Nazionale Tumori, in Rome and President of the Italian Federation of Life Sciences.
The list of the platforms has to be finalized in the first half of 2022, but Mattaj says that it’s still early to say when they will be ready, and that it will take a few years before buildings, equipment and people are in place. He adds that, should the consultation recommend a facility that HT is already building for its own scientific projects, it will be better to increase its capacity rather than build a second one. “Our intention has always been to give external users access to the facilities we are creating, and it would be an inefficient use of public money to duplicate a facility,” he says.
“The expectations are enormous, and the implementation time depends on HT”, says Gelsomina Pappalardo, Italy’s delegate for ESFRI.
