OBI — Open Brain Institute
Overview
The Open Brain Institute is a Swiss non-profit organisation founded in March 2025 that makes simulation neuroscience openly accessible through cloud-based Virtual Labs, and released all outputs of the preceding EPFL Blue Brain Project openly on its closure. The Blue Brain Project (BBP) was a CHF 300 million Swiss National Research Infrastructure project hosted at EPFL from 2005 to 2024, a founding contributor to simulation neuroscience as a research discipline, which completed biologically detailed digital reconstructions of the mouse neocortex and whole brain. On closure, all outputs were released openly, including over 18 million lines of code and models from approximately 300 peer-reviewed publications. OBI’s Virtual Labs allow researchers to build, modify, and simulate digital brain tissue across species and disease states, using NeuroML as its primary model description standard and integrating with EBRAINS and OpenSourceBrain.
Connections
- relatedTo: Human Brain Project (BBP was the Swiss national counterpart; shared scientific leadership and HBP/EBRAINS infrastructure)
- relatedTo: EBRAINS (BBP tools deployed within EBRAINS; OBI continues that integration)
- relatedTo: NeuroML (primary model description standard for OBI Virtual Lab simulations)
- relatedTo: ModelDB (BBP and OBI models deposited; OBI uses ModelDB as a community model archive)
- relatedTo: OpenSourceBrain (model sharing platform used for OBI-compatible NeuroML models)
- relatedTo: NWB (OBI uses NWB as a data format for experimental data integration into simulations)
Resources
- https://www.openbraininstitute.org
- https://bbp.epfl.ch (Blue Brain Project legacy site)
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005273