Celebrating 10 years of Euro-BioImaging Industry Board

The Euro-BioImaging Industry Board (EBIB) is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, marking a decade of fostering collaboration between the imaging industry and the broader European community of imaging service providers and users.

This Industry Board has been instrumental in supporting Euro-BioImaging in the early days. Key players in the European imaging industry signed a position paper in 2012, emphasising the importance and added value of a pan-European infrastructure in imaging that helped to further strengthen the position of Euro-BioImaging, which had already been a European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) landmark since 2008, towards funders and the member states.

The seven companies that founded the EBIB during a meeting in Oslo on 22 May 2014 might have been unaware that the process until Euro-BioImaging became an official ERIC would still last another 5 years, and that shortly afterwards the global Sars-Cov-2 pandemic would put a further hold on the anticipated engagement with the Nodes.

But those who took a long-term strategic perspective were rewarded: through Euro-BioImaging, companies have now access to an unprecedented network of imaging facilities that has doubled in size from 21 Nodes in 9 countries and at EMBL in 2019, to 41 Nodes in 18 countries plus EMBL today. At the same time, Nodes find a direct communication channel to companies that develop and provide imaging products to make their needs heard.

During its 10 years of existence, the Euro-BioImaging and its Industry Board have fostered an open dialogue and established robust two-way communication channels to reach a better understanding between the imaging industry and facilities.

Regular surveys with the Nodes, first started in 2018, provide valuable insights for companies into Node operations and the technical, training, and data management challenges experienced by the Nodes. Updates on European projects and initiatives inform companies of opportunities to participate and engage – from training webinars and workshop to pre-commercial procurement to joint grant proposals for technology development. And industry partners bring their own valuable expertise to some of the Euro-BioImaging expert groups, such as those on Image Data, Remote Access or Smart Microscopy. Many of these activities have thus provided the groundwork for longer collaborations.

Thus, the EBIB has played a pivotal role in strengthening the relationship between technology providers and the Euro-BioImaging advanced imaging platforms across the continent.

The fact that the EBIB has grown to 17 members that now meet quarterly, actively engage with the Nodes at the annual meeting and are seen as part of the Euro-BioImaging community, is a testament to its success.

In the coming months, we will be launching a series of interviews with key figures from the EBIB’s 10-year history, offering unique insights into the evolution of industry-academia collaboration in the field of imaging research. As we celebrate this important anniversary, we're excited to share the stories behind the EBIB's successes and the vision for the next decade.

Read the first interview with Christoph Thumser, the first EBIB chair.