An area of CHIP pioneering innovation is federated networks, a practice which enables decentralized approaches to data distributed across sites. From our faculty’s earliest forays into the field with the Shared Pathology Information Network (The NCI funded “Napster for pathology samples”) to the first demonstration of federated research networks for biosurveillance, to development of the Shared Health Research Innovation Network (SHRINE) network.

Our program has worked with sister academic medical institutions to establish globally scalable technology, policies and procedures for sharing genomic, phenotypic and biospecimen data on broadly consented cohorts, across sites of care. We have, in partnership with our sister sites, developed two federated data sharing commons, the Genomic Research and Innovation Network (GRIN) and the Genomic Information Commons (GIC). Our faculty have developed the first query portal in the world that provides a uniform interface that enables users to retrieve genomic data, phenotypic data and biospecimen metadata in a single query. The technology, policies, and procedures that we have developed enable us to acquire additional partners and scale our federated data sharing globally.

Projects