CINECA: Common Infrastructure for National Cohorts in Europe, Canada, and Africa - Kick Off Report

The CINECA consortium was formed in response to the EU call ‘Better Health and care, economic growth and sustainable health systems’ (H2020-SC1-BHC-2018-2020) with a proposal for an international flagship collaboration with Canada for human data storage, integration and sharing to enable personalised medicine approaches. CINECA proposes 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. The CINECA Kick off meeting was held on January 24th-25th 2019 at the Wellcome Genome Campus Conference Centre, Hinxton UK. The key objective of the meeting was to bring together consortium members to facilitate discussion on the project’s goals and action plan. The report focuses on an overview of the Work Packages as presented to the consortium (focusing on deliverables due in the first reporting period), the cohorts included in the project, and the decisions made by the Executive Board for actions to implement year 1 of the project