Global Alliance for Genomics & Health: CRDC as a Driver Project
This year, the Cancer Research Data Commons (CRDC) marks five years as a Driver Project with the Global Alliance for Genomic and Health (GA4GH). The GA4GH is an international non-profit collaboration of organizations in the research community dedicated to advancing human health by developing technical standards and policy frameworks that expand the responsible, voluntary, and secure use of genomic and related health data. GA4GH Driver Projects are real-world initiatives that shape, implement, and promote GA4GH products, ensuring that they serve real needs.
CRDC engages with the GA4GH community by actively participating in work on relevant topics, such as cloud environments, best practices for data models and schemas, data discovery, data security, and data access. In the recent GA4GH April Connect 2025 Meeting held at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, CRDC members contributed to forward-looking conversations on building trust in federated data sharing systems, GA4GH’s role in responsible adoption of generative AI for health, the importance of real-world partnerships, and strong infrastructure and policy that account for ethical and technical complexity.
CRDC has already integrated the following GA4GH products that are fundamental to CRDC’s infrastructure:
- The Data Repository Service (DRS) specification provides a standard way to retrieve a dataset regardless of the repository’s underlying architecture
- The Passports specification provides a model for encoding information about the researcher and their data access permissions to ensure that they can only unlock datasets for which they are authorized
As Heather Creasy, CRDC Program Officer and Driver Project Champion representing CRDC within GA4GH, notes, “Adhering to standards facilitates interoperability. The more we align our technical specifications and policies with the broader scientific community, the easier it will be to share our data and use data generated by others to advance cancer research.”
In addition to participating as a Driver Project, CRDC also represents the NCI in a new multidisciplinary NIH GA4GH working group. The group's mission is to increase awareness of the GA4GH across the NIH and to consolidate NIH research interests and requirements in the development and implementation of GA4GH standards, policy frameworks, and tools.
To learn more about GA4GH and its trans-NIH GA4GH Working Group, contact Heather Creasy at heather.creasy@nih.gov.
Learn more about GA4GH.