NEW YORK(GenomeWeb) – BioReference Laboratories today announced it has joined the Pistoia Alliance and the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
BioReference joins the Pistoia Alliance as a participating member. The alliance brings together more than 80 life science companies, vendors, publishers, academic groups, and individuals to collaborate on R&D on a pre-competitive basis. The members identify the causes of R&D inefficiencies and develop best practices and technology pilots by working on open projects.
BioReference joins GA4GH as an organizational member. The initiative has more than 285 organizations in 30 countries working to create a common framework to safely share genomic and clinical data.
BioReference also is the first commercial laboratory to make GA4GH's Beacon available to the worldwide medical research community, it said. The Beacon project is an open web service whose goal is to test the willingness of international sites to share basic genetic data. The project is designed to be simple to use and to prevent the return of information that may be interpreted as violating an individual's privacy.
BioReference is the 14th organization to join the Beacon network, it said. The Elmwood Park, NJ-based firm added that it will initially make available all gene variants that its GeneDx subsidiary discovers using whole-exome analysis.