Berlin, Feb. 22, 2019

In January, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) has selected EUCANCan as new Driver Project for 2019, together with six other of the world’s renown genomic data initiatives. GA4GH Driver Projects work collaboratively to advance and pilot GA4GH standards for sharing genomic and health related data.

The newly elected projects are: EUCANCan, 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), EpiShare, and Autism Sharing Initiative.

The GA4GH is a policy-framing and technical standards-setting organization, seeking to enable responsible, voluntary and secure genomic data sharing within a human rights framework. It is an international, non-profit alliance formed in 2013 to accelerate the potential of research and medicine and brings together more than 500 leading organizations working in healthcare, research, patient advocacy, life science and information technology. The GA4GH community is working together to create frameworks and standards to enable the responsible, voluntary, and secure sharing of genomic and health-related data.

This objective goes hand in hand with EUCANCan’s goal to bring together clinical, bioinformatics, computational and legal scientists partners form leading research institutions across Europe and Canada in order to develop a global infrastructure enabling the interoperability between different PerMed nodes.

EUCANCan (European-Canadian Cancer Network) is funded by the European Union’s research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 with 6 million EUR and co-funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The initiative is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) over the duration of four years, starting from January 1st 2019.