In Attendance:
Present: Uma Kanga, Derek Middleton, Brian Tait
Skype In: Steve Mack
ASHI IDAWG meeting summary
We reviewed the meeting of the IDAWG that was held in conjunction with the recent ASHI meeting, and the IDAWG's role as a subcommittee of the ASHI Scientific and Clinical Affairs Committee. Brian Tait suggested that the working group may be able to establish a similar relationship with the ASEATTA standards committee, and agreed to ask Linda Smith to contact Steve Mack or Jill. It was generally agreed that the working group having some sort of formal role with the histocompatibility and immunogenetics societies would facilitate the group’s ability to bring issues to the attention of the community.
Agenda items:
1 - Specific IDAWG projects for the 16th International HLA and Immunogenetics Workshop
We discussed developing specific projects for the 16th workshop that would be open to participation to the community, and that could be pursued in common with related groups, like HLA-NET, while allowing each group to retain its own identity. Derek indicated that HLA-NET is focusing on issues of data-sharing, the recording of ambiguities, data-analysis, selection of populations, and the ethical considerations of population selection. We generally agreed that projects pertaining to, ambiguity reduction standards, data-management tools, data-sharing standards, reporting guidelines, and novel data-analysis methods, were promising candidates for 16th Workshop projects.
Brian Tait proposed communicating with the type-1-diabetes genetics consortium (T1DGC) in terms of solutions that that project has developed for data-management and analysis, and establishing a dialogue between the T1DGC and the immunogenomics community. Several members of the working group are affiliated with the T1DGC project. Derek Middleton suggested that the T1DGC should be involved in the 16th Workshop.
2 - Tissue Antigens Commentary outline
Derek, Brian and Uma made plans to review the outline of the proposed Tissue Antigens commentary after the meeting to discuss which sections could be contributed. We discussed submitting versions of the commentary to Human Immunology and the International Journal of Immunogenetics in order to carry the discussion of standards for data management and analysis to the entire community. We also discussed submitting an abstract summarizing the content of the commentary for the 2010 EFI meeting.
3 - ASEATTA-specific issues for the working group to address
We discussed the need to establish contact with the histocompatibility and immunogenetics community in China, as considerable amounts of high-quality data are being generated in that country. Steve Mack and Derek planned to coordinate with Chinese researchers they knew.
Overall, we agreed that it would be critical to develop a mechanism to reliably collect and disseminate the raw genotype data generated by individual laboratories, whereas most data are currently only available in the form of allele frequencies. The benefits of access to these genotype data would have to be made clear, and the journals would need to require that these data be made available.
At this point, the meeting adjourned.