The Wiri Agreement: The World Integrative Research Initiative

During the consensus process promoted by the STEP Action, the representatives of these consortia agreed that a paradigm shift is necessary in the way in which biomedical research is carried out.

It is necessary that laboratory and clinical observations are accumulated and made accessible to all those who can use them to develop or to validate new hypotheses; it is necessary that the knowledge we have on a sub-system, a certain dimensional scale, or a certain biophysical aspect can be formalised and interconnected to others that are being developed on contiguous sub-systems, scales, domains.

They defined this new approach Integrative Research. In order to promote and foster this shared vision, the consortia established the World Integrative Research Initiative (WIRI).

By signing the WIRI Agreement this group of large research consortia declared their commitment to foster by all means an international collaboration aimed to promote the development of Integrative Research in Biomedicine by pursuing collectively or independently a number of positive initiatives aimed to the the development of a community of interested researchers, the identification of common research objectives, the identification of the major research challenges related to them, the required resources, the related ethical/legal/gender issues, as well as technological implications such as software interoperability.