Canadian Platform for Genomics and Precision Health
Delivering better outcomes for Canadians by making it easier to derive AI-powered discoveries across networks of data in neuroscience, oncology, rare disease, infectious disease, health care, agriculture and beyond.
Project Overview
Updated December 27, 2024
The Problem
In order to make discoveries, scientists and decision makers need data. These datasets are currently distributed across many different institutional, regional and national systems, making it impossible to leverage their collective power to make insights. The traditional approach of centralized “data sharing” – where datasets are combined by uploading and analyzing them in one place – is not suitable for sensitive datasets because co-locating data is inefficient, insecure, not scalable nor regulatory compliant, and does not empower data stewards to retain control over data.
How We Are Solving It
The technology developed throughout this project will enable privacy-preserving “federated insights”, where insights can be derived across distributed datasets without moving them. All data remains in place and so, instead of “moving data to the question” this new approach “moves questions to the data”. This is more efficient, secure, scalable, compliant and empowers custodians to retain control over data. The CP4GPH will be used to train AI-powered models across federated networks of data in neuroscience, oncology, rare disease, infectious disease, health care, agriculture and beyond.
The goal of the project is to democratize access to leading-edge technologies for customer groups across the genomics and precision health ecosystem to be able to create, grow and take advantage of federated learning networks. To help achieve these aims, the project will create a menu of new software and related services that can be licensed to data generators (such as sequencing companies, hospitals, precision health initiatives, patient advocacy groups and funders) who want to increase the impact of their data, and to data consumers (such as health ministries and pharmaceutical companies) who want to extract insights from shared data.
The project will cultivate an open innovation ecosystem that additional stakeholders can plug into, and will ultimately commercialize globally-leading solutions to manage, share, analyze, and translate insights from genomics and health data. This will put Canada at the forefront of precision health: driving innovation, creating jobs, and fostering high-caliber research and discovery.
*Funding redirected by Autism Speaks, PacBio and Roche to be used to fund DNAstack, McGill, Holland Bloorview, University of New Brunswick (UNB) and SickKids. DNAstack will be overseeing the management and distribution of this fund on behalf of Autism Speaks, PacBio and Roche.
Project Lead
Project Partners
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“Innovation is a team sport, especially when building digital technologies for creating, protecting, sharing and analyzing health data. We believe there is no program better suited than Digital to successfully deliver the audacious goals set out by this project: to continue growing Canadian companies, building world-leading technologies and creating a healthier, sustainable and talented world.”
CEO, DNAstack