The Department of Vertebrate Genomics at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics also hopes to become one of the two ultimate winners, with its 'IT Future of Medicine' (ITFoM) project.

Unlike, for example, nuclear research at Cern, medicine has so far played a limited role in advancing research and development. The institute hopes the ITFoM scheme will change that. As the health sector moves towards highly individualized medicines that require huge amounts of data analysis and modelling, ITFoM would develop new workflows and IT architectures to cope with the zetabytes of data this will involve.

According to the Commission, ITFoM would create new procedures for data integration and access, as well as new techniques for handling massive data files — a single human genome represents around 6GB of data.