CANARIE selects CanDIG as basis for a prototype National Data Service for Health Genomics

As data management grows more important for science, building Canadian capacity for managing and securely accessing health genomics will help accelerate biomedical discovery

Toronto, 27 Nov 2018

Data volumes everywhere are growing rapidly. In genomics — the study of the entirety of genetic information of individuals and populations— new sequencing technologies and techniques are turning this flood into a torrent, and all of that new data holds the promise of delivering new insights into biology, health, and disease.

But this promise can only be fulfilled if researchers can readily search, access, and analyze this data. Managing rapidly expanding datasets is a problem in all fields; with inherently sensitive health data, security, privacy and authorization make it even more challenging, while the potential of improving health outcomes raises the stakes.

CANARIE’s Research Data Management Program aims to address these data issues across fields, by funding software development for nine National Data Services in fields as diverse as ocean studies, quantitative social sciences, and genomics.

In genomics, this service will be built upon CanDIG — the Canadian Distributed Infrastructure for Genomics — which provides a national platform for enabling large-scale genomic analyses across private datasets controlled by the local institutions who are responsible for the data.

The new funding will allow support for a broader range of new data types (collectively called “‘omics” data), such as RNA sequencing and expression data, as well as more automation and a richer set of access and quality controls to make the platform more accessible to a wider range of researchers. The new set of services are called CHORD, for “Canadian Health ‘Omics Repository, Distributed”, and the project is led by Professor Guillaume Bourque at the Canadian Center for Computational Genomics (C3G) at McGill.

“The CHORD project addresses real problems for genomic research across Canada, ” said Bourque. “Discoveries in this field come from availability of large national sets of consented data; if a researcher can’t find the data they need to perform their analyses, important biological questions don’t get answered.”

“CanDIG is a very solid foundation for this project,” said Professor Michael Brudno, PI of CanDIG and Director of the Centre for Computational Medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children. “Our federated approach to making data available for analysis while strictly controlling direct access is exactly what is needed for health data service, and our international collaborations as part of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) will ensure the new services we build are internationally interoperable and best-practice.”

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CanDIG is a project building a health genomics platform for national-scale, federated analyses over locally controlled private data sets. It is funded by the CFI Cyberinfrastructure program and connects sites at McGill University, Hospital for Sick Children, UHN Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Jewish General Hospital and Université de Sherbrooke. It is also a collaboration with Genome Canada, Compute Canada and CANARIE.