Funding
Overture is developed and built by the Genome Informatics program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, on grants from Canadian and American public funders. This page lists every grant supporting the platform, its funding period, and the organizations contributing to individual components.
Digital Research Alliance of Canada
2026 to 2028. Under this grant we are transforming Overture from a data catalogue into an AI-assisted discovery and analysis platform. Using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), researchers will be able to explore, analyze, and visualize data through transparent, reproducible conversational workflows across Canadian research platforms including ICGC-ARGO, OHCRN, and iMicroSeq.
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
2023 to 2028. As working group 2, we are developing a federated framework for genomic data access and analysis, specifically building an enhanced Overture data submission system to facilitate the ingestion, validation, and tracking of clinical and molecular data into the PCGL platform.
- Project: Pan-Canadian Genome Library (PCGL)
National Cancer Institute at the US National Institutes of Health
2021 to 2026. Under this grant we are making the Overture platform more accessible by breaking down barriers to adoption, integrating existing analysis tools and adding federated search functionality between distributed Overture instances using standardized data governance frameworks (GA4GH).
- Grant number: #U24CA253529
Canadian COVID-19 Genomic Data Infrastructure
2020 to 2024. The VirusSeq Data Portal, since renamed iMicroSeq, demonstrated Overture's expansion beyond oncology data management. This funding adapted the platform to support viral genomic data, and enabled the development, deployment and ongoing maintenance of Canada's central SARS-CoV-2 sequence repository.
- Project: VirusSeq Data Portal, now iMicroSeq
The Government of Ontario
Our team is partly supported through operational funding from the Government of Ontario via OICR, which receives core funding from the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Colleges and Universities.
Additional Support
We also thank the following organizations for their contributions to Overture.
- EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, for contributions to Lectern.
- The Ferretti Lab at the Research Center of the CHU Sainte-Justine, for contributions to Arranger.
- The South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), for feedback that identified documentation gaps and improvements to the platform and its user experience.
For more information about our funding, or to discuss a potential collaboration, email us at contact@overture.bio