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SFU Researchers Land $525K Grant from CFI to Develop New Health Research Data-Sharing Resource (iReceptor)
Tuesday, September 20, 2016Company Profile | Follow Company
SFU researchers (l-r) Bojan Zimonja, Felix Breden, Jerome Jaglale and Jamie Scott have received $1.3 million from the CFI, BCKDF and SFU towards developing the iReceptor Data Integration System, which will enable health research data sharing.
Burnaby, BC, September 20, 2016--(T-Net)--Two Simon Fraser University professors are close to realizing their vision of a new data-sharing resource for the immune genetics research community, thanks to a major funding boost from the federal and provincial governments.
SFU biology professor Felix Breden and health sciences professor Jamie Scott have spent several years laboriously building a comprehensive database of gene sequences, one that would help them characterize the unique features of antibodies that neutralize a broad spectrum of HIV variants.
Similar data are being generated and stored by individual research centres around the world. Integrating these data into a federated data commons will unlock its full potential for the design of new vaccine against targets such as HIV and therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune disease.
The $1.3 million, three-year project is being led by SFU, with the BC Cancer Agency and the University of Toronto as its core partners. The Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) announced today it is supporting the team with a $525,000 grant through its Cyberinfrastructure Initiative completion. The BC Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) is providing nearly $525,000 towards the research while SFU is providing the remaining funding.
The project will leverage advances in sequencing technology and cyberinfrastructure that make it faster and easier to produce and share secure health research data.
Led by Breden, the iReceptor Data Integration System will enable biomedical research to be shared with partner institutions in Canada and internationally.
“Today's new DNA-sequencing technology allows for fast-paced sequencing of the genes encoding millions of antibody and T-cell receptor molecules, in a matter of hours," says Breden, a professor of population genetics and genomics. "The new challenge is where to store those data, and how to access and share it among researchers around the world."
SFU will bring in partners and create the technical setup that will allow researchers at its member organizations to share unprecedented amounts of complex immunogenetics data. “We're all putting our research into the same box, but at the end of the day, we still own, control and maintain our own research," adds Breden.
“iReceptor will exploit SFU's big data expertise, and its computing power as host of a national Compute Canada data centre, to network and collaborate in ways that haven't been possible before,” says Vice-President, Research Joy Johnson. “There is tremendous potential for making significant breakthroughs in precision medicine as a result.”
The iReceptor Data Integration System is expected to be running within the year.
One of the first steps is to integrate the SFU system with those at the BC Cancer Agency Genomic Science Centre and the University of Toronto, both part of the core scientific team.
Marc Miller, MP for Ville-Marie—Le Sud-ouest—Île-des -souers, announced more than $10 million in research infrastructure through the CFI's latest Cyberinfrastructure Initiative competition.
The SFU-led iReceptor is one of seven projects across Canada to be funded, including four others in which SFU is part of the core scientific teams:
• CBrain, led by researchers at McGill University, is one of the world's most advanced computing platforms for brain research, and is critically important in helping to find cures for brain diseases. More than $1.1 million in CFI funding will help researchers, including SFU engineering science professor Faisal Beg, to combine huge amounts of data from genetics, brain imaging and psychological interviews, with the help of new information technologies, such as cloud services and remote data visualization, to tackle these health challenges.
• The MERIDIAN Consortium includes researchers from 12 Canadian research organizations, among them, SFU computing scientists Jian Pei and Fred Popowich, as well as global world-class ocean acoustic researchers. They will develop a research data infrastructure to consolidate and support ocean acoustic data, the first of its kind globally. The project will lead ocean researchers to fully exploit Canada's ocean data, monitoring trends in the state of the ocean acoustic environment, and enable more timely, effective and efficient protection of valued marine species and protected areas.
• Given exponential data growth in genomics, Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children is leading a project that will build a computational framework for analyzing genomic datasets relevant to human disease. With partners who include SFU researcher Steven Jones, and using Compute Canada's infrastructure, the goal is to maximize how genome sequences are used across Canada and connect infrastructure and data between Canadian genomics and high performance computing (HPC) sites. They will also link to data generated by clinicians and scientists globally.
• The Université de Montréal leads a project that will aid social sciences and humanities researchers conduct large scale research projects via a new infrastructure that better hones existing and new scientific information and documents. Increasing efficient discovery tools and high power computing capacity will lead to new pathways for research on Canadian history, society and culture. SFU researchers Juan Alperin, John Maxwell and John Willinsky are part of the core team while the Library's Brian Owen and Alex Garnett are part of the technical team.
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