Communities of Interest

Many GA4GH contributors share an interest in specific genomics and health topics, such as rare disease, cancer, and infectious disease. They form communities that find challenges and opportunities for better data use in the real world.

Solving silos

Bringing together genomics projects working on data infrastructure, management, analysis, and sharing, GA4GH Communities of Interest are uniquely positioned to bridge the divide between technical developers and clinical practitioners.

Communities of Interest offer a forum for researchers, clinicians, and technical experts to uncover needs in specific domains. Current Communities of Interest include Cancer, Rare Disease, and Infectious Disease.

Participants define, discuss, and advance real-world use case that could involve GA4GH products. Together, they find opportunities to put GA4GH products into use.

 

Mission

GA4GH Communities of Interest promote global cooperation, responsible data sharing, and collaborative research in each domain area by uncovering needs for new GA4GH products and implementing existing products.

Goals

  • Increase chances of collaboration, especially interoperability and data sharing.
  • Connect international initiatives with common needs through interoperability standards.
  • Strengthen communication and interaction between users and developers to support the creation of fit-for-purpose solutions.
  • Identify opportunities to put existing products into practice.
  • Find gaps in the GA4GH product development roadmap.

Communities of Interest

Rare disease icon
Rare Disease Community: promotes global cooperation, data sharing, and collaborative rare disease research through the exchange of expert knowledge and promotion of GA4GH standards.
clinical genomics lab icon circle
Clinical Genomics Laboratory Community (partnership with ClinGen): connects laboratories around the world, with the aim of fostering collaboration, developing standards and best practices, and facilitating knowledge exchange.
Cancer Community
Cancer Community: promotes global cooperation, data sharing, collaborative cancer research, and better oncology care through the implementation of GA4GH products.
infectious disease icon
Infectious Disease Community (partnership with PHA4GE): bridges pathogen and host genomics to bring together international groups that support standardising genomic data use to better diagnose and treat infectious disease.
neuroscience community icon
Neuroscience Community (partnership with INCF): fosters global cooperation to unite international groups and improve data sharing, data governance, and collaborative research in neuroscience.

Activities

  • Identify opportunities to collaborate and share datasets, workflows, and processes to answer otherwise impenetrable questions.
  • Learn how others use GA4GH products to tackle similar challenges.
  • After uncovering needs for standards in specific projects, and finding other groups with similar challenges → work moves into a Study Group.
  • After finding opportunities to integrate data from two or more international domain-specific projects with an agreed goal → work moves into the GA4GH Implementation Forum (GIF).

Join us

Meet leaders in data use for cancer, rare disease, infectious disease, and beyond by participating in a GA4GH Community of Interest.