The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international consortium that is developing standards for responsibly collecting, storing, analyzing, and sharing genomic data in order to enable an "internet of genomics". GA4GH was founded in 2013.
GA4GH is founded on the , which is based on the human right to benefit from scientific advances.
GA4GH maintained by four Host Institutions (Wellcome Sanger Institute, Broad Institute, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the European Bioinformatics Institute). Heidi Rehm is the current GA4GH chair and Peter Goodhand is the Chief Executive Officer. Kathryn North is the current Vice Chair and Ewan Birney is the past chair.
Organizational members of the alliance include:
GA4GH is supported by a "Funder's Forum" composed of organizations whose funding commitments exceed USD $200,000 annually, for at least three years. Forum members include:
All GA4GH standards are developed by six technical and two foundational "Work Streams" in collaboration with real-world genomic data initiatives called "Driver Projects."
The Genomic Beacon API is a standard of GA4GH. The "Beacon" protocol was originally proposed as a simple standard for the discovery of genomic sequence variants using federated queries against a potentially large number of genomic databases with implicit security provided through the use of limited query parameters and restriction to Boolean responses. In the version 2 of the protocol the API supports "phenoclinical" queries (e.g. combining parameters for genomic variant discovery with diagnostic or technical parameters) as well as responses containing versions of the matched records.