CGEn Year in Review: Highlights of 2019
Enabling Canadian leadership in genomics research by supporting world-class research or technology development
- In 2019, using the infrastructure funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), CGEn completed the delivery of over 18,000 whole genome, 39,500 transcriptome, 5,359 exome, and 110,611 other genome-wide experiments on biosamples from Canadian research projects, including human and non-human studies.
- CGEn’s flagship CanSeq150 program, committed to de novo sequencing of 150 novel Canadian species, has now selected over 90 species as individual projects. Data delivery is complete for some and sequencing is now well underway for many other projects. See full list of projects here.
CGEn scientific leaders acknowledged for their contributions through prestigious awards and recognitions.
- Dr. Stephen Scherer, (Scientific Director, CGEn-Toronto) was awarded the Killam prize in health sciences. Dr. Steven Jones (Scientific Director, CGEn-Vancouver) was awarded the first Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Genomics and Dr. Marco Marra was awarded the Don Rix Award for Lifetime achievement by Life Sciences BC.
- CGEn investigators Dr Steven Jones and Dr Marco Marra were named on the highly cited list in 2019
CGEn researchers made significant scientific contributions to genomics research and precision medicine
- The Autism MSSNG project reached its initial goal of sequencing more than 10,000 whole genomes of individuals with autism and their family members, creating the world’s largest open-source precision medicine database specific to understanding autism.
- Exciting high-impact research findings from all three nodes have been disseminated through peer-reviewed publications. A few examples of such findings are the development of single-cell sequencing approaches to detect changes in Cancer, identification of predictive markers for early diagnosis of Autism, and single-cell transcriptomics to define developmental mechanisms in Childhood Brain Tumors.