Completed Genetics & Molecular Biology Food & Agriculture

The Genome Campus Alliance

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation European Bioinformatics Institute
Funding £1.8M
Period Aug 2016 — Dec 2020

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every time a doctor or researcher wants to compare a patient’s genome against millions of others to find a disease-causing mutation, they hit a wall of incompatible data formats and privacy rules. The Genome Campus Alliance (GCA) is building the digital plumbing to fix that. It brings together three major European bioinformatics organisations—EMBL-EBI, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and ELIXIR—to create and deploy open-source software tools that let different databases talk to each other using common technical standards set by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). Until now, implementing those standards has relied on unpaid volunteers working in isolation. The GCA will instead coordinate a systematic, large-scale rollout. The team will use these tools to analyse data from Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project, and through ELIXIR they will identify shareable datasets, coordinate compatible implementations across Europe, and deliver training. If successful, this project will turn genomic data sharing from a patchwork of one-off efforts into a reliable, interoperable infrastructure—the kind of invisible system that makes large-scale medical research and future clinical diagnostics possible without researchers having to think about it.

View original technical description
The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international consortium committed to sharing genomic and clinical data to address pressing research questions and to develop innovative clinical applications. Its major activity is to develop open technical and operational standards. However, translating these standards into concrete solutions requires implementation and testing of the proposed interfaces and practices, and incorporation of these experiences into the standards process. To date, this effort has been done largely by volunteers and it has lacked a coordinated effort to deploy the developed solutions. The Genome Campus Alliance (GCA) is a collaboration of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and ELIXIR to create, deploy and manage an "at-scale" implementation of the GA4GH reference standards and application programming interfaces (APIs). We will leverage our experience with large-scale service resources to create open source tools designed to access existing data resources at EMBL-EBI and WTSI using the GA4GH methods and interoperability standards. We will make these tools available to GA4GH-member Genomics England, and use them ourselves to analyse 100,000 Genomes data. Through ELIXIR, we will identify shareable data, coordinate GA4GH compatible implementations across Europe and deliver training to maximise GCA's impact.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Paul Flicek (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health: Setting the Standards for Genomics and Health-Related Data Sharing
Biodiversity Genomics Europe plus
Generation Scotland
European participation in global biodiversity genomics endeavours aimed at identifying all biodiversity on Earth
Bge

Original classification

Collaborative Award in Science

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.