India and Sweden will soon begin joint research programme to support research of the highest scientific quality in the areas of medicine and health and the natural and engineering sciences. The two broad area of joint research include e-Science for Life Science and Antimicrobial resistance in a ‘One health’ perspective.

The programme supports cutting edge research that brings together faculty and young researchers from Sweden and India. The programme is financed by The Swedish Research Council, Vinnova (the Swedish Innovation Agency), the Swedish Research Council Formas and the department of science and technology (DST) in India on the principle of reciprocity, parity and activity matching funding.

The main objective of the programme is to support new or existing Indo-Swedish collaborative groups that in the longer perspective may develop into long-term collaborations. The collaborations shall be based on the principle of mutual benefit, equality and commonly set objectives.

The two broad area of joint research include e-Science for Life Science and Antimicrobial resistance in a ‘One health’ perspective.

e-Science is a concept that builds upon the use of computers (HPC and storage) and software, as well as on human expertise, to enable scientific discovery based on computation and exploration data from various sources. These sources may be experimental data, simulations and existing databases. eScience has its foundation in applied computer science and mathematics, and makes intense use of hardware infrastructures such as high performance computing, digital networking and visualisation. In life science research today e-Science is already deployed as an important tool. Its importance is expected to grow, providing a wide impact within life science, including e-Health.

Antibiotics are of an immense benefit to mankind but its overuse and spread in the environment leads to antimicrobial resistance which threatens to disarm the health care when efficient weapons against microbes are needed. The One Health concept is a worldwide strategy for expanding interdisciplinary collaborations and communications in all aspects of health care and research related to humans, animals and the environment. It links efforts in human medicine, public health and animal health with upholding food safety, waste management and the ecosystem health.