Canadians leading the way in global project sharing health research data

TORONTO – Three Canadian organizations are playing a key role in an unprecedented collaboration involving 18 health institutes on three continents that will enable registered researchers to analyze a virtual cohort of genomic and biomolecular data from 1.4 million individuals through a cloud-based network.The initiative is intended to help clinicians and scientists reduce duplication of research efforts and ultimately improve benefits to patients through the responsible sharing of data on a very large scale.The Common Infrastructure for National Cohorts in Europe, Canada and Africa (CINECA) is led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute. Canadian organizations will be involved through the Canadian Distributed Infrastructure for Genomics (CanDIG), a national health and genomics platform that allows authorized queries and analysis of data over locally controlled private data sets.The Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics, based at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto and McGill University in Montreal, will lead the management and analysis of federated health data for CINECA.Canada’s health data system has always been federated and CanDIG’s experience with building federated queries and analyses over locally controlled private health data is essential to the CINECA project.“The technical goals we’ve set for ourselves are ambitious,” said Dr. Michael Brudno, senior scientist in the Genetics & Genome Biology program at SickKids and principal investigator for CanDIG. “But we’re confident that we can not only meet those goals but build open-source standards-based solutions for the entire community.”“CanDIG is already connecting several important Canadian health data sets in cancer research,” added Guillaume Bourque, director of the Centre for Computational Genomics at McGill and co-principal investigator of CanDIG.“As part of this project, we’re proposing to connect additional Canadian data sets, and then connect those to an even larger number of data sets internationally. Those new connections between data sets are going to allow Canadian researchers much deeper insight into even that data they already had access to,” said Bourque.Steve Jones, head of bioinformatics and co-director of the Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver, is also co-principal investigator of CanDIG.“Key to this project’s success is trusted, reliable, federated data querying and analysis,” Jones said. “We’ve shown how this can be done in support of real science and insight, while retaining control over the data we’ve been entrusted with, and we’re excited to bring our expertise in data federation to the international community.”The CINECA project is funded by the EU through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and by Canada through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.

Canadians leading the way in global project sharing health research data

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