One Billion Pieces of Data and Growing: Canada’s Living Population Laboratory Overview, Case Studies & Access Guide

This webinar will provide an overview of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP) —Canada’s largest population study of more than 320,000 Canadians in six regional cohorts across the country — that allows researchers to explore how genetics, environment, lifestyle and behaviour interact and contribute to the development of cancer and other chronic diseases.

The CPTP is a population study that maintains harmonized and de-identified self-reported data, physical and biochemical measures, and includes genomic profiles from participants who have consented to linkage to provincial and national administrative health databases. This allows researchers to tackle challenging questions at a lower cost, in less time and with more certain conclusions.

Researchers are already integrating CPTP data into their own studies, generating valuable insights that may enable earlier detection, monitoring, and inform future interventions. Two case studies will explore how CPTP participant data is linked with cancer data to better understand disease risk, and another that linked participant and environment data to study gene-by-environment interactions.

The webinar will be led by Dr. Philip Awadalla, Professor of Population and Medical Genomics at the University of Toronto. He joined CPTP as Principal Investigator in 2009, initially as the Director of the CARTaGENE study in Quebec until March of 2015 and then as the Director the Ontario Health Study in July 2015. He was named National Scientific Director of CPTP in March 2018. Dr. Awadalla is a Director of Computational Biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), and is the Director of Genome Canada’s Canadian Data Integration Centre.