BCN, 13 Feb, 2019.- The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international, nonprofit alliance formed in 2013 to accelerate the potential of research and medicine to advance human health. It brings together a growing community of over 500 leading organizations -among them CNAG-CRG- working in healthcare, research, patient advocacy, life science, and information technology.

The GA4GH currently has 22 Driver Projects, which are real-world genomic data initiatives that help guide the alliance development efforts and pilot its tools. Stakeholders around the globe advocate, mandate, implement, and use these frameworks and standards in their local contexts.

Recently, GA4GH has named seven new Driver Projects for 2019; three of them have CNAG-CRG as key contributor:

- The European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD), which is building a sustainable ecosystem of tools, projects, and programmes across Europe and beyond in order to enable a virtuous circle between rare disease care, research, and medical innovation. It works to support, scale, and connect existing resources and to adapt them for implementation by end users.

- EUCANCan is a federated network of aligned and interoperable infrastructures in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Spain for the efficient analysis, management, and sharing of cancer genomic data.

- EpiShare is a joint project between the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) and the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) that aims to adapt and extend GA4GH resources to make accessing, sharing, and analyzing epigenomic data more flexible.

The CNAG-CRG will play an essential role and share its expertise on analysis and interpretation of genomic data to help deploy strategies that facilitate the transfer of genomic knowledge to the clinic. On top of these three new GA4GH Driver Projects, CNAG-CRG is also involved in two other projects that were already part of the earlier group of initiatives: ELIXIR Beacon and Matchmaker Exchange.