WAGER Overview

Achieving a greater understanding of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors in health and disease is perhaps the greatest challenge for modern biomedical science. Genes, environmental factors and our lifestyle act both independently and in combination to influence our vulnerability to disease. Those countries with the most opportunity to make effective use of genomic information in basic science, clinical, and public health applications are those with total population and longitudinal data linked to family health records.

With these opportunities come significant challenges.  Researchers need to be able to collect, manage and analyse often vast amounts of phenotypic, biomedical and genotypic data.  This data is costly and time consuming to collect and must be tightly secured against loss or misuse.  

The Western Australian Genetic Epidemiology Resource (WAGER) has been established as a Core National Enabling Resource to develop infrastructure to facilitate the integration of existing and future disease-specific clinical, epidemiological and genetic resources with biospecimen banks and with linked health data.

The WAGER suite of informatics applications provide a solid foundation for the conduct of human medical research studies.  Our solutions seamlessly and transparently integrate patient recruitment, data collection and data analysis functions whilst maintaining the highest levels of data security and integrity.  

As a result of being initially funded through an NHMRC Enabling Grant, WAGER has been able to develop its capabilities to the point where it is able to cost-effectively provide Australian researchers with access to unrivalled informatics capabilities. Researchers within WA also have the opportunity to link their research data hosted by WAGER with the core WA Health Data maintained by the Western Australian Health Department.

WAGER also collaborates closely with the WA DNA Bank, which provides cost effective DNA extraction and storage. (wadb.org.au)

With access to the right software tools researchers no longer need to spend significant time developing and managing their own informatics infrastructure and are able to focus on discovery.