Medically related Life Sciences use the mouse as a model system to understand the molecular basis of health and disease in humans (>95% similarity of genes in humans and mice). An essential task for Biomedical Sciences in the 21st century will be the functional analysis of mouse models for every gene in the mammalian genome. The major bottlenecks identified by the user community will be proper characterization (Mouse Clinics), archiving and dissemination of mouse disease models to the research laboratories. The current capacities, governance structures and funding strategies of existing infrastructures will not be able to serve the upcoming urgent needs. Thus it is imperative to organise and establish now an efficient distributed infrastructure for the phenotyping, archiving and dissemination of mouse models on a well concerted, large-scale and pan-European level. This will be a prerequisite for maintaining Europe’s leading role in the functional annotation of the mouse genome. Infrafrontier will guarantee the accessibility of mouse models and will be essential to facilitate their exploitation. Infrafrontier integrates 15 European laboratories with exceptional track records to implement and run large-scale infrastructures. Infrafrontier builds on existing infrastructures under EMMA and EUMODIC and forms a coalition with a significant number of funding agencies to develop the prerequisites to a common European infrastructure. The Infrafrontier preparatory phase aims to organise a stable and sustainable infrastructure by 1) the identification of the most suitable legal form, 2) developing a business plan based on a sustainable funding concept, 3) reaching a legal agreement between all partners and 4) providing a strategic plan for the construction phase. Infrafrontier will therefore give Europe a leading position in the worldwide competition on resources and knowledge for medically relevant mouse models by providing a user-driven platform.