CINECA

Thousands of human genomes and other biomolecular datasets are now being generated in health, rather than research contexts. Centralised storage and analysis of these is no longer technically feasible for data harmonisation, curation, sharing or analysis and ethical, legal, social reasons. CINECA’s vision is a federated cloud enabled infrastructure making population scale genomic and biomolecular data accessible across international borders, accelerating research, and improving the health of individuals across continents. CINECA will leverage international investment in human cohort studies from Europe, Canada, and Africa to deliver a paradigm shift of federated research and clinical applications.

The CINECA consortium will create one of the largest cross-continental implementations of human genetic and phenotypic data federation and interoperability with a focus on common (complex) disease, one of the world’s most significant health burdens. The partners represent a unique combination of scientific excellence with experience of eleven diverse cohorts and scientific projects such as the European Genome-phenome Archive, CanDIG, and H3Africa. CINECA has assembled a virtual cohort of 1.4M individuals from population, longitudinal and disease studies.

Federated analyses will deliver new scientific knowledge, harmonisation strategies and the necessary ELSI framework supporting data exchange across legal jurisdictions enabling federated analyses in the cloud. CINECA will provide a template to achieve virtual longitudinal and disease specific cohorts of millions of samples, to advance benefits to patients. CINECA will leverage partner membership of standards and infrastructures like the Global Alliance for Global Health, BBMRI, ELIXIR, and EOSC driving the state of the art in standards development, technical implementation and FAIR data.

CINECA is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825775.