News & Comment

The 11^th International Conference on Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs (ICORD), South Africa, included the Africa-Rare initiative launch and facilitated multi-stakeholder engagement in the challenges facing, and opportunities for, Africans living with rare diseases. The following ICORD Global Call to Action, developed in collaboration with the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium, synthesizes the outcomes of the deliberations and emphasizes the international collaborative efforts required to address the global effects of rare diseases on public health.

Ancestral and geographical issues underlie the need to develop Africa-specific guidelines for the return of genomics research results in Africa. In this Commentary, we outline the challenges that will inform policies and practices in the future.

A fundamental problem in rare-disease diagnostics is the lack of consensus as to which genes have sufficient evidence to attribute causation. To address this issue, we have created PanelApp (https://panelapp.genomicsengland.co.uk), a publicly available knowledge base of curated virtual gene panels.

A generic framework for providing participant information and implementing a tiered consent process for health genomic research in Africa can help to harness global health benefits from sharing and meta-analysis of African genomic data while simultaneously respecting and upholding the autonomy and individual choices of African research participants.

To increase the utility of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations for interpretation of genome-wide experimental data, we have developed GO-CAM, a structured framework for linking multiple GO annotations into an integrated model of a biological system. We expect that GO-CAM will enable new applications in pathway and network analysis, as well as improve standard GO annotations for traditional GO-based applications.

The Nordic region, comprising primarily Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, has many of the necessary characteristics for being at the forefront of genome-based precision medicine. These include egalitarian and universal healthcare, expertly curated patient and population registries, biobanks, large population-based prospective cohorts linked to registries and biobanks, and a widely embraced sense of social responsibility that motivates public engagement in biomedical research. However, genome-based precision medicine can be achieved only through coordinated action involving all actors in the healthcare sector. Now is an opportune time to organize scientists in the Nordic region, together with other stakeholders including patient representatives, governments, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and funding agencies, to initiate a Nordic Precision Medicine Initiative. We present a roadmap for how this organization can be created. The Initiative should facilitate research, clinical trials and knowledge transfer to meet regional and global health challenges.