BHCGC consortium to play key role in NIH's large-scale effort to advance precision medicine

The Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center (HGSC) today announced participation in the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program, a large-scale effort to advance precision medicine. Baylor College of Medicine and its partners, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR) and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, comprise the Baylor-Hopkins Clinical Genome Center (BHCGC) - one of three All of Us genome centers across the country that will generate clinical grade genomic data from samples contributed by the program's participants. DNAnexus will serve as the primary portal for the BHCGC consortium.

The mission of the All of Us Research Program is to accelerate health research and medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment, and care for all of us. The program will partner with 1 million or more people across the United States to build the most diverse biomedical data resource of its kind, to help researchers gain better insights into the biological, environmental, and behavioral factors that influence health. As part of its work, the program plans to sequence 1 million genomes.

"Innovations in data management and sharing are crucial to the success of All of Us," said Richard Gibbs, PhD, Director of Baylor College of Medicine HGSC. "The advanced methods for analyzing DNA and for understanding variation across and within groups of All of Us participants require the cloud computing scale and low-cost storage that the HGSC has delivered, much in collaboration with DNAnexus."

DNAnexus has a long history of investment in information technologies geared for precision medicine. Security and compliance are critical for handling Protected Health Information (PHI) and protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII); the DNAnexus Platform provides the industry's most comprehensive security and privacy framework, supporting compliance with HIPAA, FedRAMP, CAP/CLIA, and GxP regulations. The same secure and compliant DNAnexus service powers the FDA's precisionFDA platform for advancing regulatory standards for NGS-based drugs and devices.

"The All of Us Research Program presents an extraordinary opportunity to catalyze precision medicine in the United States, and in collaboration with the BHCGC team, we are committed to the program's success," said Richard Daly, Chief Executive Officer at DNAnexus. "We look forward to developing the Baylor-Hopkins All of Us Portal (BHAoU Portal), which will enable the processing, managing, and sharing of genomic and clinical data at an unprecedented level."

The BHAoU Portal will enable real-time sharing of genotyping and whole genome sequencing data with BHCGC and the All of Us Data and Research Center to improve the health of future generations. The BHAoU Portal will leverage cloud resources to drive innovation in data analysis that facilitates analysis and collaboration around petabyte-scale genomic and phenotypic data. BHCGC researchers and program staff will benefit from the transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance tracking that controls BHCGC pipelines and ensures consistent, reproducible results.