Our community partners are helping us co-design approaches that meet their communities' needs. This means we work with a group of community members to figure out how to best reach, talk with, and invite people from their community to take part in OurDNA.
Working together, we hope to engage thousands of diverse Australians to be part of OurDNA and shape the future of healthcare.
We’re also working closely with representatives from the multicultural sector who are advising us on program-wide decisions. With the Australian Multicultural Health Collaborative, an initiative of the Federation of Ethnic Communities' Councils of Australia, we’ve brought together a group of advisers who are helping us to ensure community interests are central to OurDNA, providing input on things like how we share data.
Many organisations and individuals are already working with OurDNA. Click the button to view all of our partners and learn more about them.
Co-design is central to OurDNA. Our workshop reports are just part of a process of working in partnership with community members to make sure that the program meets their needs.
Join us at a community event to learn more and be part of the change.
If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, contact us.
OurDNA is a flagship project of the Centre for Population Genomics. The Centre is set up to:
The Centre is a not-for-profit joint initiative from two of Australia’s leading research institutes: the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne.
OurDNA is funded by:
Yes, the OurDNA project has been approved by the certified Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) of the Royal Children’s Hospital. The reference for our ethics approval is: HREC/91986/RCHM-2023
If you have any questions about the OurDNA ethics approval process, or wish to speak to someone independent of the research team, you may contact the Director of Research Operations at The Royal Children’s Hospital. You can phone the Director on (03) 9345 5044 or email them at rch.ethics@rch.org.au
OurDNA is currently funded until the end of 2027. It is our intention to continue our work until all Australian communities are represented and for the OurDNA database and sample bank to be available for as long as possible for researchers.
To take part in OurDNA, you must:
At the moment, Australians from the following ancestry groups are under represented or entirely missing in genetic resources:
Australian doctors have also told us that it is hard to find information about these ancestry groups in the resources and databases they use to diagnose genetic and health conditions.
OurDNA is working to engage with the communities underrepresented in genetic resources. Visit this page to check which communities we are actively working with.
While we are not working directly in Indigenous communities, we are an active member of the ALIGN and CONNECT consortia, national Indigenous-led efforts that are working to empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in genomic medicine and research.
We provide technical advice for the development of genomic data infrastructure for nationally consistent, culturally appropriate, ethical storage, management, and sharing of genomic data to benefit Indigenous Australians.