Last week, the Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project held a three-day hackathon in Lapland, Finland, bringing together 59 participants — mostly developers — from 19 EU countries that are signatories to the 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG) initiative. Norway was among the countries represented.
The hackathon focused on advancing the technical capability for secure and federated human genomic data management that is compliant with the 1+MG Framework. Each participating country demonstrated their national node, and teams worked on harmonising deployments to enable federated gene variant lookups in the next stage.
Key outcomes
- 3 cross-border data integration bugs identified and fixed during the hackathon
- 15 countries now have national data services securely connected to the European end-user portal
- Clear organisation of national genomic data environments into staging and production tiers
- Many European countries now have at least one service technically integrated into the user portal at the European level, with some already in a production-like environment
The new services enable data discovery through a genome allele frequency browser and a dataset catalogue. For an example of what this looks like in practice, see the Luxembourg GDI portal.
Why this matters
This hackathon marks an important milestone in the 1+MG initiative. The increased technical capability moves Europe closer to an operational federated Genomic Data Infrastructure — enabling researchers to create real value from the Genome of Europe data while keeping safeguards and trust at the centre.
The 1+MG initiative is making a federated network of human genomic data across Europe a reality, with privacy and security built in from the ground up.
For more details, see the GDI project’s post on LinkedIn.