Navdeep Bains, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and economic development, recently announced an investment of up to $49 million in a Digital Health and Discovery Platform (DHDP), a network of partners working to establish a Canada-wide health data platform.
This award, together with $108 million in cash and $165 million in in-kind contributions from 97 consortium partners, supports the DHDP that will combine Canadian expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and precision medicine. While the platform will initially focus on cancer, the plan is to expand to other areas of medicine in future.
DHDP is expected to begin with an initial composition of 95 partners across nine provinces, including 31 health care institutions, 19 companies, 7 universities, 22 research foundations, granting agencies and non-government organizations, as well as all four major Canadian AI research labs.
The DHDP will empower the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres network, launched by the Terry Fox Research Institute on April 12 in St John's, Newfoundland, on the 39th anniversary of Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope to cure cancer. For the first time, cancer centers and research institutes across the country are joining forces to advance a roadmap to cure cancer, to benefit all Canadians.
The four-year project will leverage technology vendor Imagia's EVIDENS AI discovery platform and clinical collaboration ecosystem. EVIDENS enables federated learning on patient data across multiple hospitals. The platform empowers clinical researchers from different pan-Canadian institutions to derive outcome-based insights from real-world evidence and collaborate on AI biomarkers and clinical decision support systems.
Also playing a key role will by the Canadian Distributed Infrastructure for Genomics (CanDIG), which provides a national platform for enabling large-scale genomic analyses across private datasets controlled by the local institutions who are responsible for the data. CanDIG will connect research centers together using an open-source, standards-based, federated national platform allowing researchers to perform analyses on data sets across the country while allowing each research center to keep its patients data local and private, in keeping with Canada’s new Digital Charter.
“Bringing world-class AI talent to national health data while maintaining patient privacy is such an important challenge,” said Guillaume Bourque, director of the Centre for Computational Genomics at McGill and co-principal investigator of CanDIG, in a prepared statement. “We think we’ve demonstrated a path forward with our very Canadian approach to safely and securely federating access to private health data while respecting the needs of patients and research institutions every step of the way. We’re really enthusiastic about taking this next step.”
