The Genome Campus Alliance

Year of award: 2015

Grantholders

  • Dr Paul Flicek

    European Bioinformatics Institute

  • Dr Thomas Keane

    Wellcome Sanger Institute

  • Dr Guy Cochrane

    European Bioinformatics Institute

  • Mr Andrew Yates

    European Bioinformatics Institute

  • Dr Helen Parkinson

    European Bioinformatics Institute

  • Dr Daniel Zerbino

    European Bioinformatics Institute

  • Dr Niklas Blomberg

    European Bioinformatics Institute

Project summary

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international consortium committed to ethically sharing DNA sequence and clinical data to address pressing research questions and to develop new clinical applications. Its major activity is to develop open technical and operational standards for these types of data. The added value of the GA4GH will be to connect all the existing genetic and medical records that are otherwise isolated from each other. However, translating these standards into concrete solutions requires implementation and testing of the proposed interfaces and practices.

The Genome Campus Alliance (GCA) is a collaboration between the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) and ELIXIR to create, deploy and manage a full-scale implementation of the GA4GH standards and interfaces that are used by programmers to access data. Our open source tools will be designed to access existing databases at EMBL-EBI and WTSI using the GA4GH methods and standards.

We will identify additional shareable data through ELIXIR, coordinate the implementation of GA4GH standards across Europe and deliver training to maximise GCA’s impact.