In 2015 Boston Children's Hospital, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Cincinnati Children's Hospital came together to form the Genomics Research and Innovation Network (GRIN). Now the hospitals plan to use a multi-year federal grant to scale up and extend the data-sharing collaboration to new institutions.
The grant from the National Institute of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will transform GRIN into a larger federation of medical centers that are equipped to share large amounts of genomic information while protecting patient privacy. UPMC in Pittsburgh and Washington University in St. Louis have joined the project to help scale it up.
"As medicine evolves from art to digital data-driven science, large datasets are needed for care and discovery," said Kenneth Mandl, M.D., M.P.H., director of the Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program and the project's principal investigator, in a statement. "Clinicians and researchers need diverse reference populations to better understand individual patients' genetic findings, while allowing data to remain with the patients and the hospitals that generated it. And those reference populations should resemble the patients being studied and treated."
The most significant barrier to pediatric research has been the ability to identify and recruit sufficiently large patient cohorts, especially when studying rare diseases. Expanding a nationally interconnected network of institutions will accelerate GRIN's success at translating genomic discoveries into improved clinical care.
The GRIN Network has demonstrated the power of sharing comprehensive, hard-to-gather data about childhood diseases across multiple hospitals. A paper recently published in Genetics in Medicine describes how the network was established and reports proof-of-concept outcomes for three pilot studies on early childhood obesity, epilepsy, and growth disorders and short stature. The new grant will enhance GRIN's biomedical informatics infrastructure and create shareable versions of its consents and agreements.
