The CINECA project is a cloud-based data collaboration that will make human omics data from more than a million individuals from Africa, Canada and Europe. It will help to accelerate disease research, drug development and discoveries by providing secure access to clinical research data to authorised researchers.
We see the CINECA project as a great opportunity to implement concrete examples of the Personal Health Train concept for distributed analysis of biomedical data. Key idea behind this concept is that the data stays in place, with the custodians in charge of it - such as the hospitals involved in the network. But analyses on this data can still be run by scientists, without exposing privacy-sensitive information. This is especially important for an area such as genomics, where big data analysis is indispensable and can save lives for example for people with rare diseases, where information from other parts of the world can be crucial for finding a diagnosis.
We look forward to building this out with the partners in this consortium, and also contributing these concepts and software code to global communities such as the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
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