Canadian Platform for AI in Health
Enabling AI-powered insights to rapidly and securely advance precision health.
Project Overview
Updated February 5, 2025
The Problem
1 in 4 Canadians die of cancer.1 1 in 12 are diagnosed with a rare disorder, two-thirds of them children.2 To understand how we better diagnose, treat and cure genomic and related health disorders: we need to better understand our data at an individual level. Precision health is poised to transform how we receive healthcare—providing us with unique health treatments depending on our specific genes, biology, demographics and environment.
Data is the cornerstone to this new frontier. Vast amounts of data on everything from DNA sequences to health outcomes need to be collected and analyzed to discover new treatments and opportunities. Yet, scientists and decision makers often cannot access large or diverse enough data to answer their questions. These technical and financial barriers for single organizations to overcome are daunting.
Data is also siloed across different institutions, provinces, countries, clouds, devices and software systems. While health data represents about 30% of the world’s total data3, it often remains inaccessible for researchers. Health data is also incredibly sensitive with numerous regulations on personal health information such as PIPEDA, HIPAA and GDPR limiting data movement.
The result is that precision health research is slowed down, and fewer discoveries are made that could otherwise lead to better health outcomes for all Canadians.
How We Are Solving It
Led by DNAstack in collaboration with Autism Speaks, Valence Digital, Pacific Biosciences Canada and SickKids; the consortium will aim to advance Omics AI, an AI-powered platform that rapidly and securely shares and analyzes omics and health data across the world.
Omics AI is the result of previous DIGITAL-supported investments, most recently the original Canadian Platform for Genomics & Precision Health project. The software solution makes it easier for data stewards to connect, protect and share their data, while also making it faster for researchers to discover, access and analyze it.
As part of the second phase of the original project, the consortium will aim to accelerate the global go-to-market strategy of Omics AI to make it faster and easier for data stewards and scientists worldwide to use. Core to the platform is the idea that “more data drives more discoveries”. As increasing numbers of data stewards connect their data to digital networks, scientists in turn can access a greater volume and diversity of data, empowering them to derive new insights.
Further, the project team will look to package its world-first approach to data networking into new features and products. This productization effort will support functionalities such as: enabling data stewards to allow scientists to ask high-level questions of their data without revealing any sensitive information; leveraging large language models to enable scientists to ask questions in plain language; and extending the integration of Omics AI with third-party applications to increase its power and convenience.
The potential impacts are far-reaching from disease-gene and target identification to clinical trial recruitment and drug development – enabling accelerated research into disease areas like oncology, neuroscience, infectious and rare disease. Together, these enhancements will allow Omics AI to generate AI-powered insights from data, enabling collaboration on precision health at a global scale led by made-in-Canada innovation.
Project Lead
Project Partners
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“We believe the best way to improve individual healthcare experiences begins with learning from our collective healthcare experiences. This project is fast-tracking the development of technologies that can learn from many health datasets in a privacy-preserving manner at a global scale.”
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, DNAstack -
“By connecting experts who are using our instruments to sequence genomes at unprecedented levels of resolution, we are building a more diverse and complete catalog of human variation, paving the way for insights that would otherwise be impossible to discover.”
President and Chief Executive Officer, PacBio -
"This is a pivotal moment, where we can understand and improve health with molecular precision. The technologies being developed as part of this project will help push the boundaries of what is possible to transform children's health worldwide."
Chief of Research, SickKids