EU and Canada Jointly Invest $9.6M in Israeli-Led iReceptor Plus Project to Advance Health Data Sharing

VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) has learned that the European Union and the Canadian government recently awarded a $9.6 million grant to the Israel-led international iReceptor Plus project, which will be used to promote the sharing of genomic and health data.

The IReceptor Plus Consortium comprises more than 20 partners from nine countries, aiming to facilitate the storage, integration, and sharing of human immune repertoire data for clinical learning and scientific research.

As a flagship project of the IReceptor Plus consortium, the iReceptor Plus initiative aims to develop a platform that integrates and enhances distributed Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) databases to support personalized medicine for cancer, inflammatory, and autoimmune diseases.

“This project will make data more standardized and accessible. To date, each laboratory and company has established its own sequencing datasets,” said Gur Yaari, iReceptor Plus coordinator and Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University, in an interview with the media. “Our system will provide institutions and organizations with data needs with uniform data production standards and equitable data access rights. Moreover, each institution and company can independently decide which data to share and with whom.”

According to a report by The Jerusalem Post, participants in the iReceptor Plus project include Bar-Ilan University, the University of Haifa, Rabin Medical Center, data storage company Infinidat, and project management firm Interteam. Through close collaboration among numerous academic institutions, clinical healthcare organizations, and industrial partners, the iReceptor Plus Consortium will establish an iReceptor Plus networked database across multiple international sites to demonstrate the effectiveness of the iReceptor Plus project in real-world clinical and biopharmaceutical applications.

Rabin Medical Center is an Israeli healthcare company.

Infinidat is an Israeli company founded in 2011 that provides data storage and protection services. Its core products are the InfiniBox data storage system and Host Side, which offer management tools and data solutions for enterprise application administrators.