Common Infrastructure for National Cohorts in Europe, Canada, and Africa

Over the last forty years, we have seen the emergence of increasing numbers of large cohorts of human samples from research and national healthcare initiatives (e.g. UK Biobank, H3Africa). In Europe alone, the BBMRI-ERIC directory lists nearly 600 distinct biobanks with over 100 million samples of biomaterials and genetic data. In Canada there are sixteen biobanks and in Africa, three H3Africa Biorepositories are now established. The rapid advances in molecular biology techniques such as DNA genotyping and sequencing has enabled ever larger cohorts of human exomes and genomes to be generated, facilitating study of the underlying causes of disease. It is predicted that in the next five years through national scale healthcare initiatives, an increasing number of large cohorts including complex variables such as phenotypes, measurements and medical histories will be generated.

To maximise the impact of this data for researchers, healthcare, industry, patients and funders, we have assembled a set of expert partners in resource delivery who are embedded in the communities which generate, analyse, standardise and share genomic data. We currently operate the state of the art infrastructures, analyses, knowledge discovery and data discovery platforms and translation to healthcare on which we will build to deliver our vision of a federated solution enabling population scale genomic and biomolecular data accessible across international borders accelerating research and improving the health of individuals resident across continents.