Date: 2015-02-24
Type of information: Collaboration agreement
Compound:
Company: Qiagen (The Netherlands) Allele Frequency Community
Therapeutic area: Technology - Services
Type agreement: collaboration
Action mechanism:
Disease:
Details: * On February 24, 2015, a coalition of 13 leading life science and diagnostics organizations announced the formation of the Allele Frequency Community, a landmark initiative that is creating an extensive, high-quality and ethnically diverse collection of human genomes to address a key challenge in interpreting sequencing data for research and clinical applications. The announcement coincides with the start of the 16th annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) scientific meeting in Marco Island, Florida. The Allele Frequency Community was recently formed after the 13 organizations agreed to pool their extensive human exome- and genome-wide variant call datasets in a secure, anonymized, pooled fashion to create the most ethnically diverse, freely-accessible, hosted community database of allele frequencies available. Until now, labs often collected their own, private allele frequency libraries, but did not have the infrastructure and incentives to integrate their resources into a freely-available community asset. To enable this resource to grow, users have the opportunity to opt-in to join the Allele Frequency Community and benefit from the extensive database, agreeing in return to contribute statistics from their sequences to the database. Only anonymous, pooled allele frequencies are provided, protecting patient privacy. The Allele Frequency Community database already holds more than 70,000 variant call datasets including 8,000 whole genomes and has been shown in internal benchmarking studies to generate a 43% average reduction in false positive rates in causal variant identification. The founding collaborators of the Allele Frequency Community are:
David Goldstein, Columbia University Institute for Genomic Medicine
Madhuri Hegde, Emory Genetics Laboratory
Peter van der Spek, Erasmus University Medical Center
Eric Schadt, Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai
Gustavo Glusman, The Institute for Systems Biology
Greg Eley & Joe Volckley,Inova Translational Medicine Institute
Tom Kaminski &Stan LetovsEnlighten Health Genomics, a business of Laboratory Corporation of America® Holdings (LabCorp®)
Nathan Pearson, New York Genome Center
Heidi Rehm, Partners Healthcare Personalized Medicine
Doug Bassett, QIAGEN Bioinformatics
Phil Hieter, University of British Columbia
Jay Shendure, University of Washington
Chris Mason, Weill Cornell Medical College
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