GHGA defends proposal for second funding phase
- 30 Oct 2024
l to r: Stefan Wesner, Fruzsina Molnár-Gábor, Oliver Stegle, Juliane Winkelmann, Jan Korbel
In August, GHGA, together with the first round of National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) funded consortia, handed in a renewal application for follow up funding within the NFDI after fall 2025. Defending this proposal for the next phase of GHGA, five members of the consortium, including GHGA board of directors members Oliver Stegle and Jan Korbel, as well as co-spokespersons Juliane Winkelmann, Fruzsina Molnár-Gábor and Stefan Wesner, travelled to the German Research Foundation (DFG) Head Office.
In a session with NFDI4Health, the consortia each gave a 20-minute presentation followed by a lively discussion with the international review panel. The subsequent poster session allowed the consortium and reviewers to go into more details about the past, present and future of GHGA.
The presentation and discussion covered key concepts and plans for operating and developing a sustainable omics database and secure processing environment for data sharing. Tightly embedded within national and European health infrastructures, GHGA aims at developing a full end-to-end service portfolio for opening omics data for secondary use, as exemplified by dedicated pioneering projects such as the German Model Project Genome Sequencing, the German National Cohort (NAKO) and a re-analysis pipeline for rare disease data.
While it will take a while to receive official feedback for the next funding period according to the timeline of the NFDI process organised by the DFG, initial feedback from the reviewers was very encouraging and appreciative. GHGA is now continuing its developments, focussing on the extension of the GHGA Data Portal as well as ongoing work in the GHGA workstreams. By this, GHGA will have created a firm foundation to continue the extension of GHGA in the next funding phase, hopefully starting in October 2025.