Background
Representatives from four United States National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded platforms — All of Us, NCI's Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC), NHLBI BioData Catalyst (BDC), and NHGRI AnVIL — identified a shared opportunity to demonstrate interoperability across their systems, building in part on earlier work by NCPI.
Despite decades of investment in large-scale genomic studies, most genome-wide association study (GWAS) participants have been of European ancestry, limiting the clinical utility of tools like polygenic risk scores for other populations. What has been missing is not the data, the scientific motivation, or even the access frameworks — NIH Researcher Auth Service (RAS), the GA4GH Data Repository Service (DRS), and Passports all exist — but a clear, documented, researcher-accessible demonstration that these pieces work together in practice. This project aims to fill that gap by conducting a cross-platform, multi-ancestry GWAS that draws on datasets from all four systems, using GA4GH Passports for authentication and DRS for data access, all initiated from within a single workspace.
Ongoing Work
The project has adopted a two-track approach:
- Joint planning to establish a single, shared technical approach.
- Parallel implementations, with cross-analysis where feasible, rather than requiring uniform participation across all systems.
The project anticipates convergence around shared design and code for RAS-based authentication and DRS-based bulk data access, with a structured data access approach still to be determined. The resulting parallel implementations are expected to demonstrate how shared standards can support a diverse ecosystem of platforms.
The project is expected to run at least one year in total, allowing time to relay feedback to relevant GA4GH working groups and promote the resulting capabilities to target research communities. Future phases are anticipated to build on this work and expand to additional NIH systems.
References
https://www.nih.gov/allofushttps://
datacommons.cancer.gov/
https://biodatacatalyst.nhlbi.nih.gov/
https://anvilproject.org/
Getting involved with the Federated Data Sharing Between NIH Systems
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