GA4GH Adds Seven Genomic Data Initiatives As New Driver Projects

By Bio-IT World Staff

February 4, 2019 | The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) has named seven of the world’s leading genomic data initiatives as new Driver Projects for 2019. The GA4GH Driver Projects work collaboratively to develop and pilot GA4GH standards for sharing genomic and health related data.

The newly added projects are: Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa), GEnome Medical alliance Japan(GEM Japan), European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD), Swiss Personalised Health Network (SPHN), EUCANCan, EpiShare, and Autism Sharing Initiative.

GEM Japan is a new project from the Japan Agency for Medical Research & Development (AMED), which aspires to facilitate the sharing of genomic and phenotypic information from completed and ongoing Japanese research efforts with the domestic and global communities. The Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics are developing SPHN, a nationally coordinated infrastructure which will enable a federated network for sharing genomic and other health related data for research across Switzerland.

“Several of the new projects are diverse international collaborations to share data and knowledge across national borders,” said Heidi Rehm, an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a GA4GH Vice Chair, in a press release. “Collectively, these global Driver Projects bring together resources from 94 countries around the world.”

For instance, EJP RD is building a sustainable ecosystem of tools, projects, and programs across Europe and beyond in order to enable a virtuous circle between rare disease care, research, and medical innovation. It works to support, scale, and connect existing resources and to adapt them for implementation by end users. EUCANCan is a federated network of aligned and interoperable infrastructures in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Spain for the efficient analysis, management, and sharing of cancer genomic data. H3Africa is developing infrastructure, resources, training, and ethical guidelines to support a sustainable African research enterprise led by African scientists, for the African people. The goal is to facilitate fundamental research on the African continent into both common disorders and communicable diseases.

The new projects expand GA4GH’s scope not just in geographic reach, but also in domain reach by connecting them, for the first time, to the autism and epigenetics research communities. The Autism Sharing Initiative brings together the world’s most ambitious efforts in autism to create the first federated, global network for sharing genomics and clinical data to accelerate discoveries and the development of precision therapeutics in autism. EpiShare is a joint project between the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) and the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) that aims to adapt and extend GA4GH resources to make accessing, sharing, and analyzing epigenomic data more flexible.

GA4GH is also expanding its collaboration with ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science data, which brings together bioinformatics resources in 23 European countries. In addition to the existing ELIXIR Beacons Driver Project, this GA4GH and ELIXIR Strategic Partnership will deepen collaboration between the two organizations across all GA4GH Work Streams with specific efforts in building capacity in the areas of cloud computing and authorization and authentication infrastructure (AAI).