Cancer Community

The GA4GH Cancer Community seeks to promote global cooperation, data sharing, and collaborative cancer research by implementing GA4GH standards and identifying opportunities for the development of new standards.

The GA4GH Cancer Community (GCC) serves as a forum for researchers, clinicians, and technical experts to define, discuss, and advance real-world cancer use cases through the implementation of GA4GH standards. The forum aims to:

foster the development of cancer-specific solutions by strengthening collaborations between cancer research tool users and developers;
boost opportunities for collaboration by prioritising interoperability and the sharing of cancer-related data;
and unite international cancer initiatives with common needs and shared goals.

The GCC hosts informational presentations about implementing GA4GH standards within cancer genomics platforms and collaborative workshops focused on specific challenges within the community. Past discussions have explored cancer genomics projects interested in data infrastructure, management, discovery, analysis, and sharing.

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Identified focus areas

Under new leadership, we are in the process of surveying the community and identifying new focus areas that are representative of current community interests and needs.

Past focus areas

Cancer variant representation pertaining to gene fusions and categorical complexity
Federated analysis and approaches for collecting germline variation data
Implementations of the Beacon standard for cancer data queries and discovery
Knowledge sharing of resources to aid in cancer research, such as CancerModels.org and cloud platforms that enable cancer data analysis and storage
Development of tools geared towards harmonising somatic variant calling across oncology centres like ONCOLINER

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Goals

Strengthen the communication and interaction between users and developers to support the creation of fit-for-purpose solutions
Increase the chances of collaboration, favouring interoperability and data sharing
Connect international initiatives with common needs through interoperability standards
Establish multiple projects that demonstrate real-world interoperability and address real-world challenges

Activities

Discuss standards needs of specific projects, helping other projects to learn and adopt similar forms of implementation
Review, design, develop, implement, and exercise GA4GH based data sharing infrastructures within real-world genomic oncology scenarios
Initiate data integrations involving two or more international cancer projects with an agreed goal in cancer science or care
Collaborate and share datasets, workflows, and processes that can collectively address complex and multifaceted challenges
Create guides and share examples to support reproducibility across the cancer genomics community

community leads