Beacon training course: How to make COVID-19 sensitive data discoverable using Beacons

The online workshop BEACON - How to make sensitive data discoverable will take place on November 2 and 3. The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) Beacon Team will provide a special hands-on training session for the BY-COVID partners for "Beaconising" the datasets.

One of the main bottlenecks in human data research is the lack of tools for the secure and federated data discovery of such data. Identifiable human data requires tight privacy controls, especially now with the expansion of genomics data in clinical application, such as for medical diagnostic or prognostic purposes in rare diseases or cancer.

This workshop aims to provide knowledge and hands-on sessions about the discoverability of sensitive genomics and clinical data without jeopardising the privacy or ownership of such datasets. European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA) in collaboration with ELIXIR and the Global Alliance in Health and Genomics (GA4GH) has developed the Beacon project to tackle this challenge.

The training will be divided in two sessions:

• Session I – Introduction to Beacon: secure sharing of clinical genomics data through Beacons. This part is oriented towards clinicians or researchers handling human data (mutations, variants, Covid-19 patients etc), genomics data (VCF files) and/or associated phenoclinic metadata and would like to understand the architecture of Beacon and map their data onto the Beacon model.
• Session II – Implementation or deployment of Beacon on datasets. This part is oriented towards programmers/bioinformaticians, and some command line knowledge is required. This will be a hands-on session to deploy Beacon reference implementation (Beacon-RI) on a mock dataset or real dataset generated in session 1.

Find out more information about the sessions and the full program here.

The Beacon online workshop is free and open to anyone! Registration will be open until October 31st.