OHCRN spring re-connect
“Data is the most valuable currency in genetics research” - Raymond Kim, in his introduction to the OHCRN Spring reconnect, May 22 2024.
The Genome Informatics team presented at the Ontario Hereditary Cancer Research Network (OHCRN) Spring reconnect event. OHCRN will collect clinical (patient ID, cancer status and type, pathology) and genomic (molecular report, sequencing information, virtual biobank) data for hereditary cancer patients in Ontario, and link this to external databases such as existing registries, Ontario Health/Cancer Care Ontario. The OHCRN Spring Reconnect meeting brought together members of the OHCRN community, researchers, Ontario Health, Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (IC/ES), Indoc Research and other collaborators to share progress, challenges and ideas for the future of genomic data sharing in Ontario.
The Genome Informatics team is designing and building the participant enrolment portal, the clinical coordinator administrative dashboard and the data exploration portal (first release planned in early 2025). Our summer intern, Pratham Hemlani, supports the OHCRN project by exploring ways to (semi) automatically extract structured data from genomics lab report. This type of interactions highlights the synergy between the software engineering and research arms of our program, and how each benefit and inform each other.