NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine (CSSIOMM) and the Institut Pasteur are partnering to establish The Pasteur Global Health Genomics Center (PGHGC), a new initiative that builds on the strengths of the Institut Pasteur's network of national research institutes and aims to advance genomic research through various channels.
The PGHGC's activities will include upgrading laboratory facilities on five continents to translate collaborative biomedical research projects into clinical practice. More specifically, the center plans to set up six research sites on five continents by 2018. By 2020, the PGHGC hopes to have established a total of twelve operational data hubs, the partners said.
In addition, the center will invest in data acquisition, education, basic research, and training with the goal of developing novel diagnostics and precision therapies for cancer and infectious diseases. As part of efforts here, an educational resource center in bioinformatics and data analysis will be created at the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal, which will include an expanded production center for vaccines and cellular based immunotherapies for cancer and infectious disease research programs in West Africa.
"To fully answer new demands in the emerging era of big data-intensive and worldwide biomedical research, there is a need for a globally unifying venture that harnesses big data utilization in the search for novel diagnostics and precision medicine," Christian Brechot, president of Institut Pasteur, said in a statement. "The PGHGC initiative is the appropriate answer to this urgent problem."
"The PGHGC will enable new approaches to therapeutic decisions, drug discovery capabilities, machine learning predictive modeling, and support for clinical trials to evaluate the impact of therapeutic interventions in large patient populations," Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and chairman of CSSIOMM, said in a statement. "Our shared goal is to establish a new standard for reproducible research in life science and empower qualified local scientists, researchers, and public health officials to focus on the challenges in data utilization that are the most relevant for turning big data into smart data."
CSSIOMM has made an initial commitment of $1 million to fund the design phase of the project. The headquarters of the PGHGC will be located on the campuses of the Institut Pasteur in Paris.