The EU and Canada Award €8.65 Million to iReceptor Plus Project to Ease Genomic and Health Data Sharing
The EU and Canada Award €8.65 Million to iReceptor Plus Project to Ease Genomic and Health Data Sharing
The new collaborative international project, headed by Bar-Ilan University, aims to promote human immunological data storage, integration and controlled sharing to enable personalized medicine.
Barcelona, January 8, 2019 – The European Union (EU) and the Canadian government have awarded €8.65 million to the international iReceptor Plus consortium, which is composed of more than 20 partners, to promote human immunological data storage, integration and controlled sharing for a wide range of clinical and scientific purposes.
The four-year project aims to develop an innovative platform to integrate distributed repositories of Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) data for enabling improved personalized medicine and immunotherapy in cancer, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, allergies and infectious diseases. This will foster the promotion of human immunological data storage, integration and controlled sharing for a wide range of clinical and scientific purposes.
iReceptor Plus will enable researchers around the world to share and analyze huge immunological datasets taken from healthy individuals and sick patients that have been sequenced and stored in databanks in multiple countries.
The project has received €7.85 million from the EU through the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme and an additional €800,000 from the Canadian government. It is coordinated by the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and gathers 19 partners from a total of 9 countries including Canada and the United States of America.
“For Leitat, this project represents having a unique bioinformatics tool that allows us to analyze the immunological profiles of thousands of patients from a genomic point of view combined with other clinical data. This could be an excellent starting point for the development of new cancer immunotherapies and the identification of new biomarkers” says Marc Masa, principal investigator within the Health and Biomedicine Unit.
Although data will remain strictly private under the program, the platform’s software is free and open source, making it possible for the research community to extend and adapt the tools and technologies used in the project. Database nodes of the iReceptor Plus network will be distributed via several sites to show its effectiveness in the context of both clinical and biopharma use-cases.
The iReceptor Plus project will hold its opening conference in Eilat, Israel on January 14–16, 2019.
Contact
Marc Masa, PhD
+34 93 788 23 00
Press
Max Viallon
+34 699 05 04 81