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Wellcome - BGI - Digital China Health - CONVERGE

Jeremy Farrar, Director Wellcome Trust: Understanding humanity’s genetic code is not only going to be fundamental to the medicine of the future, it is an essential part of medicine today. .. The Wellcome Trust has invested more than £1 billion in genome research that has built this understanding .. (and) will further exploit this knowledge for medical advances that help patients, within a robust ethical framework that relies on their informed consent.

Wellcome Genome Campus: Congenica is a digital health company enabling genomic medicine with the world’s leading clinical decision support platform for accelerated genomic data interpretation.

Built on a foundation of clinical genomics expertise, we develop software .. and services that make the use of complex genomic data routine, accessible and ubiquitous. Our headquarters are on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge, UK, however, our reach is global.

Gryphon Scientific (p 64): A partnership between UK genomics software company Congenica and BGI Genomics in 2017 to bring advanced drugs to China, through which Congenica received funding from BGI and access to genomic data from the Chinese population, and BGI gained access to Congenica’s DNA analysis software Sapientia.

Congenica/Wellcome (17 Sep 2018): Congenica, the global diagnostic decision support platform provider, today announced it has entered into an agreement with a new strategic partner Digital China Health Technologies Cooperation Limited (DCHealth), further extending Congenica’s commitment to the Chinese market.

 

The new partnership will see Congenica develop a version of its Sapientia™ platform designed to enable clinicians and patients in China to benefit from the clinical genomics and personalised medicine revolution.

Dr David Atkins, CEO Congenica: China is an important market for Congenica and this new relationship with DCHealth gives us greater insight into what the local market requires to accelerate the broader use of genomic medicine.

Dr Andy Richards, Chairman Congenica: Congenica is at the exciting scale up stage of its commercial development. .. (A)t the forefront of the fast-moving genomics market, Congenica has demonstrated how, with the right investment and leadership, the UK can build world-leading technology companies. .. (W)ith this additional commercial partnership in China, it is poised to become the leading clinical genomics services provider.

Farrar/Koopmans/Nature (Nov 6, 2019): As well as potentially supporting diagnosis and surveillance, the fast-developing field of genomic epidemiology (and) ..(f)uture developments in predictive technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence will bring more opportunities to move towards ‘precision public health’.

Gryphon Scientific: Precision medicine entails the use of genetic and other information to tailor the treatment of an illness to the individual, compared to classical medicine where treatment is by and large the same for all.

Farrar/Koopmans/Nature: (I)t will be a challenge to persuade countries to invest in a new surveillance system, for example, before its general effectiveness has been demonstrated at a country level.

Nov 6, 2019 - interesting date to be promo-ing the need for a genomic surveillance-system demonstration.  

Fortunately, your big-opportunity - for a demonstration - had already had it’s 

  • soft-bang    -

 even as you spoke - it was quietly welling.

Wellcome: Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics have been pioneers in genetic discovery, leading the 'genetic revolution' .. in both Genetic Discovery as well as Statistical Genetics. .. The Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics remains poised to be at the forefront of the field.



 

CONVERGE (Wellcome/BGI/Oxford)

Wellcome/BGI/Oxford paper (Feb 14, 2017):  11,670 whole-genome sequences representative of the Han Chinese population from the CONVERGE project. (title)

 

Can you back-off with your CONVERGE everything? What if i don’t want to be converged?

 

Abstract

The China, Oxford and Virginia Commonwealth University Experimental Research on Genetic Epidemiology (CONVERGE) project on Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) sequenced 11,670 female Han Chinese at low-coverage (1.7X), providing the first large-scale whole genome sequencing resource representative of the largest ethnic group in the world. 

So this is a personality-disorder based exploration. What could that be used for by a totalitarian regime i wonder? 

Samples are collected from 58 hospitals from 23 provinces around China. We are able to call 22 million high quality single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) from the nuclear genome, representing the largest SNP call set from an East Asian population to date. 

So when they talk about the biggest  bank robberies - this is the biggest ever SNP hoist - to date.

We use these variants for imputation of genotypes across all samples, and this has allowed us to perform a successful genome wide association study (GWAS) on MDD.  (MAD people)

The utility of these data can be extended to studies of genetic ancestry in the Han Chinese and evolutionary genetics when integrated with data from other populations.

 

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing financial interests.