February 25, 2019
Europe and Canada build secure and efficient network to share genomic and health data
The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health introduces the European-CANadian Cancer network as one of seven new global Driver Projects
The rapid realization of precision medicine in oncology depends on the cancer research community’s ability to collaborate effectively. For genomics researchers, this means having the necessary computational tools and infrastructure to generate and share data.
Now, a new international initiative called The European-CANadian Cancer network (EUCANCan) has set out to align infrastructure across continents for the efficient analysis, management and sharing of cancer genomic and clinical data. On February 4, The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) announced that EUCANCan has been named one of seven new GA4GH Driver Projects.
“Our goal is to enable clinicians and researchers to exchange cancer data in a way that promotes effective analysis of this data while protecting patient privacy,” says Dr. Lincoln Stein, Head of Adaptive Oncology at OICR and leader of EUCANCan’s Toronto node. “With this network, we will be able to accelerate cancer genomics research on a global scale, and in turn, drive cancer discoveries that will lead to improved diagnostics and therapies.”
EUCANCan will realize its mission by uniting groups from Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Canada into a federated network. The network will help define community standards for data formats, harmonize methods to interpret genomic data, and generate strategies to manage, store and distribute data across national borders.
As one of GA4GH’s new Driver Projects, EUCANCan aims to enrich collaborations between Canadian and European genomics groups while serving the greater global research community. The Toronto node, based at OICR, will be leading the development of an open and accessible data portal to allow the research community to search, download, and analyze EUCANCan data locally and in the compute cloud.
“Together, the new Driver Projects significantly expand GA4GH’s global representation, strengthening our collaborations across Africa and Europe, as well as in Japan, and adding connections in 31 countries for a total global reach across more than 100 countries worldwide,” says GA4GH CEO Peter Goodhand.
“The new Driver Projects join a community that is building the standards and frameworks that will guide the field for years to come,” says Dr. David Altshuler, Founding Chair of GA4GH.
Read more about the 2019 Driver Projects here.
November 21, 2018
The buzz about Beacon: A look into the Global Alliance’s newest standards for the Beacon API
GA4GH releases its latest standards for genomics search engines, a project co-led by OICR Associate, Dr. Marc Fiume
While we are generating genomic data at an unprecedented rate, it is collected and studied in academic and clinical settings around the world with different data privacy requirements, making it difficult to share this knowledge. Researchers must undergo a lengthy process to request access to data and until now there has been no way to know if a data set contains information that is relevant to the research being conducted.
