The European Advanced Translational Research Infrastructure in Medicine (EATRIS) is an international research infrastructure initiative aimed at strengthening health R&D in Europe to allow a more efficient transfer of research discoveries into new clinica l applications for disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. The infrastructure will operate to increase the return on investments made in publicly funded biomedical research by removing existing bottlenecks to translation. EATRIS aims to be a European , globally competitive infrastructure for biomedical translational research and to achieve this, will provide researchers across Europe broad access to state-of-the-art facilities, training and supporting services to optimise the outputs of both basic and clinical research. EATRIS was initiated by ESFRI, a strategy forum working to identify and address the needs for large research infrastructures in Europe for the next 10-20 years covering all scientific areas. EATRIS entered a three-year Preparatory Phas e in 2008 funded with 4.2 MEuro by the European Community's 7th Framework Programme, including Norway, represented by NCMM (UiO), as one of the scientific partners of the planning project. The infrastructure will be built around national translational cen tres, containing all necessary expertise and technologies for bringing discoveries from proof-of-principle to proof-of-concept. Now, the invitation goes out to the European partners for commitment to the Construction & Implementation Phase (2011-2016) to build national EATRIS Centres, supplemented by funds from Governmental stakeholders.