Generating solutions

The McGill University and Génome Québec Innovation Centre (MUGQIC) focuses on genomics applied to populations and its impact on chronic diseases, aging, cancer and genomic responses to environment. The Centre reflects key challenges in harnessing next-generation sequencing power into innovations in biomedicine, including study design; tools to assess functional differences in human tissue and cells; and techniques to assess functional genomic variation in populations.

MUGQIC supports some 900 academic and industry research teams from Canada and abroad each year, with revenues of $71.5 million over the past five years. MUGQIC has a successful track record of providing the Canadian scientific community with access to high-throughput genomic facilities and state-of-the-art methodologies. Its extensive networking with national and international genomics communities enhances its ability to adopt new methodologies and ensure their deployment in cutting-edge scientific programs.

Over the coming five years, MUGQIC will extend its support to the scientific community through ongoing work on new technologies and methodologies. Among its unique features will be ethical, legal and social frameworks for research applications in human health; methods for population-wide interpretation of genomics data; and data-driven annotation of functional variation using in-house and public human population datasets. The Centre will also develop frameworks to use whole-genome sequencing as the primary tool for genetic analyses in humans and other species.