David Miller, PacBio VP of product marketing, highlighted the company’s partnerships, including with Hamilton, Miroculus, the Broad Institute, Twist Biosciences, Google Health, DNAnexus, and DNAstack, for various companion offerings to enhance its sequencing workflow.

Read More

Publication in Cell on the genomic architecture of autism from comprehensive genomic analysis of over 11,000 individuals.

Read More

The Digital Technology Supercluster has made $10.7 million in follow-on investments to five projects under its COVID-19 stream, rounding out the Supercluster’s $60 million budget for the pandemic-focused program.

Read More

DNAstack is helping scientists around the globe better understand COVID-19, so they can develop treatments and vaccines. Read More

Co-founded by U of T alumnus Marc Fiume, DNAstack launched a search engine aimed at the global research community that scans and indexes genomic information about the novel coronavirus.

DNAstack today introduced a Beacon for SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as COVID-19, available at covid-19.dnastack.com.

Newly released APIs are the first products from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health‘s strategic roadmap for interoperability of genomic data.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) proposes a data access policy model—“registered access”—to increase and improve access to data requiring an agreement to basic terms and conditions, such as the use of DNA sequence and health data in research.

The volume of genomics and health data is growing rapidly, driven by sequencing for both research and clinical use.

Not only was Michael Szego the ethics lead on the Personal Genome Project Canada — he was also a participant, agreeing to have his genome mapped and shared publicly. 

The Personal Genome Project Canada is a comprehensive public data resource that integrates whole genome sequencing data and health information. 

The purpose of this study was to develop a national program for Canadian diagnostic laboratories to compare DNA-variant interpretations and resolve discordant-variant classifications using the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes as a case study.

Almost sixty percent of the human population resides in Asia and Africa, but only a fraction of the world’s human genomic sequencing efforts cover that community.

The Beacon Project of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life-science data, announced today an expansion of their partnership to develop the Beacon Project  that will improve the discoverability of European genomic data.

Members of the International Canadian Data Sharing Initiative (Can-SHARE) have announced the recipients of C$700,000 ($522,000) in funding under their New Initiatives program.

Genomics software startup DNAstack this week unveiled its first product, a cloud-based platform that provides tools to help genetics researchers share and analyze biomedical data in the Google cloud.

Read More

This week DNAstack, a Toronto-based genomic software company, launched its Google Cloud platform to accelerate genetic disease research and precision medicine.

In today’s Science, the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) calls for a federated data ecosystem for sharing genomic and clinical data. 

Early data-sharing efforts have led to improved variant interpretation and development of treatments for rare diseases and some cancer types.

JLABS will let startups in therapeutic, pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer health research test out ideas with access to state-of-the-art equipment, without giving up equity.

Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) today announced a $3.3 million investment in Can-SHARE – a pan-Canadian program that will enable innovation in the use of genomic data for health care for patients in Canada and worldwide. 

The Can-Share program seeks to build policies and data tools to share data among Canadian research institutions and with international partners.

Through its Data Working Group, GA4GH wants to replace many existing standards, conventions, and file formats with new ones that will scale to searching through genomes at the level of whole populations ― and, crucially, make it easier for separate organizations to share data.

The DNAstack platform is built on Google Genomics and Google Cloud Platform, giving researchers fast, easy, and more secure access to genomics data for analysis and sharing.

Read More

In February MIT Technology Review chose their 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2015—here’s how they have advanced since.

Read More

A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet.

Read More

Research labs across Ontario are full of ingenious – and even life-saving – inventions.

Read More