Advanced and innovative imaging technologies are becoming increasingly important for analysis of molecular dynamics in cells and organisms, delivering crucial information more easily than standard biochemical methods. Nevertheless, European life scientists often lack access to pioneering imaging technologies. EuBI reduces this gap by coordinating a distributed imaging infrastructure offering open access to external users from other European research institutions. Such open access model brings numerous benefits to the scientific community: it mitigates the scarcity of expert staff and the high costs for individual institutions to install innovative imaging technologies; it increases international cooperation and boosts transfer of knowledge among European researchers. EuBI will allow life scientists working in academia, health care and industry to gain access to a broader range of much-needed advanced imaging technologies and knowledge, building bridges from basic biological to medical and clinical research.

In practice, the EuBI ERIC provides: i) physical access to cutting-edge imaging technologies at the Nodes, including advanced probes, expertise and training, methods, software and analysis tools, and ii) virtual access to common image data services provided by the Hub such as software tools for image processing, common repositories for reference image data sets for sharing and re-use, academically owned cloud storage and compute services. The significantly improved research conditions for life scientists will increase European competitiveness, exchange the brain drain for a brain gain and open new research fields to European researchers. In a next step, this will fundamentally advance the molecular understanding of health and disease. For example, new and faster drug development processes will be enabled, leading to better diagnosis, therapy and disease prevention.