Funding awarded to develop an Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons
Development of the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons (ACDC) is underway thanks to a successful Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Critical Research Infrastructure bid. As part of the recent funding announcement for new medical technology and research facilities, the project received $3M to develop an Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons that is controlled, secure, scalable, internationally integrated and connected with the world's best-practice analysis platforms. The ACDC will pave the way for researchers to make new mechanistic insights and identify potential markers for coronary artery disease, plus facilitate a translational pipeline to ensure new discoveries are deployed to clinical practice.
Coronary artery disease is the leading cause of premature cardiovascular death in Australia, and results in serious disability for survivors. It is extremely difficult to detect and many patients have no warning symptoms, despite the underlying atherosclerotic plaque developing over several years. The advance of data-intensive biomarker research techniques such as genomics, metabolomics, proteomics and immuno-phenotyping along with image processing, machine learning, and systems biology pipelines is a golden chance to make the next leap in the protection of patients at risk of coronary artery disease. However, there is currently no efficient way to identify cross-study cohorts for combined analysis. The ACDC will enable combined analysis by providing researchers with access to pooled data from over 400,000 individuals across more than 18 clinical cohorts within Australia.
The successful funding bid was led by a multi-organisational team comprising the Australian BioCommons, the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, Bioplatforms Australia, the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, 23Strands, CSL Limited and 18 cohort custodians. The BioCommons team are leading the implementation of the digital infrastructure underpinning ACDC, using software systems such as the Gen3 data commons from the Centre for Translational Data Science at The University of Chicago. The digital infrastructure that ACDC yields will no doubt benefit other data intensive precision medicine programs.
The ACDC project is funded for the next four years, with the first three large datasets soon to be integrated into the platform. The team at Australian BioCommons are extremely excited to be part of the ACDC project and can’t wait to get started! Take a look at the developing Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons now.