In an article published in EMBO Reports, the BSC's Life Sciences Director calls for collaborative and decentralised scientific models to protect scientific information from political interests
ICREA professor and Director of the Life Sciences Department at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), Alfonso Valencia, has published an article in the journal EMBO Reports in which he warns of the vulnerability of centralised biomedical databases in an international context marked by instability. Given this situation, Valencia highlights Europe's role as a leader in a new model of open science in which data is free, secure and accessible.
Valencia's article, which is entitled ‘Decentralized Databases in Biomedical Research: Lessons from Recent Events’, is part of a recent issue of EMBO Reports that addresses the challenges facing scientific research in a context of increasing political pressure. The situation is particularly critical in the United States, where budget cuts have been implemented that affect the nation's scientific activity and threaten the entire world's science as a global and interconnected phenomenon.
Valencia focuses on the fragility of centralised scientific data management systems, which are essential for biology and biomedicine as they contain the knowledge accumulated over decades in hundreds of thousands of publications, databases and specialised repositories. Recent examples are the withdrawal of public health information by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with critical information on vaccination rates, epidemiological outbreaks, pollution and gender-based violence, and the collapse of the servers of PubMed, a database of scientific articles managed by the US National Library of Medicine.
Against the risks of centralisation, the BSC's Life Sciences Director advocates in his article for international collaboration and the adoption of decentralised models, which distribute data across multiple nodes, improving resilience and accessibility. Valencia highlights the success of initiatives such as the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and the European Genome-Phenome Archive (EGA) as examples of cooperation between different countries to ensure access and security of scientific information.
The PDB is a free and open database, essential for structural biology, with nodes in the US, Europe and Japan, which stores tens of thousands of globally accessible protein structures. It has been crucial to advances such as AlphaFold, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, based on artificial intelligence systems that can accurately predict the structure of proteins and how to modify them.
In the case of EGA, and its federated version (fEGA), it is a decentralised database with essential information on human genomes that facilitates transnational studies in critical areas such as childhood cancer or rare diseases. The project is coordinated by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, in this case with the support of the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation. EGA hosts an enormous amount of genomic and phenotypic data, which are stored in BSC and in EBI itself, and can also be adapted as a federated system, fEGA, which allows access to this information in several countries without moving them from their legal locations, while keeping the data secure and private.
Valencia highlights the crucial role of Europe, which has the opportunity and the duty to lead a new scientific paradigm, strengthening the funding of decentralised resources, expanding international partnerships and promoting global standards for data interoperability. The BSC researcher mentions other benchmark initiatives such as ELIXIR, which integrates bioinformatics resources from 23 countries, or EUCAIM, for the federated analysis of medical images, which demonstrate that transnational collaboration is both necessary and viable.
“The recent events in the USA are therefore a wake-up call for the scientific community. We cannot take the accessibility and integrity of biomedical data for granted. By embracing decentralized systems, we can protect critical information from political interference, natural disasters, and technical failures. The time for action is now, before the next crisis necessitates a far more extensive and costly response. We need to ensure that the pursuit of knowledge stays free, open, and resilient, no matter what,” concludes Valencia.
Reference: Valencia, A. (2025). Decentralized databases in biomedical research: lessons from recent events. EMBO Reports, 0(0), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44319-025-00417-5