Working Groups, Projects, and Committees

Concordance Study: GOAL is conducting a multi-institution concordance study, designed to evaluate agreement between laboratories when testing the same sample(s). A scientific steering committee has been assembled to help organize this effort, which will revolve around gene content shared in common between all participating sites and involving inter-laboratory sharing of DNA, with the potential to share other specimen types including FFPE tissue.

Informatics: GOAL has formed a core bioinformatics working group that has been holding regular conference calls to discuss GOAL-wide initiatives.

Shared Curation: GOAL is creating a communal crowd-sourced web-based system for sharing variants and interpretations among GOAL labs to support clinical interpretation efforts.

Hematopathology: GOAL has published information about the GOAL heme panels in development or use, as well as non-GOAL heme panels if the use of GOAL panels is currently on hold at participating labs. See the article published in May 2023 in Blood Advances: Current clinical practices and challenges in molecular testing: a GOAL Consortium Hematopathology Working Group report, led by Thomas Lee (UCLA) and Annette Kim (Brigham & Women's Hospital).

Education: Continuous education and training on fundamental, emerging, and novel topics in genomic science are at the core of this academic organization of genomic pathologists, scientists, and trainees. In 2024, an Informatics Boot Camp for fellows and an education program for 2024-2025 fellows, plus a thematic quarterly conference series on interesting cases, will be launched to provide enhancements and coverage of topics among training programs across the GOAL sites. 

Academic Advisory Committee (AAC): The AAC will be comprised of a Designated Representative selected by participating laboratory faculty/staff at each Regular Member Institution.

Industry Advisory Committee (IAC): The IAC consists of representatives from for-profit Industry Member companies, such as pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic manufacturers, or computational biology platform providers are eligible to serve on the IAC and advise GOAL. Currently, representatives from the Founding Sponsors comprise the IAC.

Governance

GOAL was officially incorporated in the District of Columbia in August 2020. In the fall of 2020, three scientific advisors were invited to provide strategic vision to the co-founders’ concepts in operationalizing the GOAL organization. Together, the inaugural Board of Directors has established a governance structure, drafted master participation agreements, and adopted Bylaws for GOAL membership in November 2021 and established its conflict of interest policy and disclosure process via a fiduciary responsibility statement. In the spring of 2022, GOAL received 501(c)(3) non-profit designation from the IRS effective August 2020. APC serves as GOAL's non-profit organizational fiscal sponsor. As a grant-making organization for sponsored projects, institutional overhead must not exceed 10% of direct project costs.

GOAL Board of Directors

• Dara Aisner, MD, PhD (University of Colorado), Co-Founder, Chair
• Jeremy Segal, MD, PhD (University of Chicago), Co-Founder, President
• Daniel Jones, MD, PhD (Ohio State University), Secretary/Treasurer
• Jennifer Morrissette, PhD (University of Pennsylvania), Member-at-Large, Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee
• Christopher Gocke, MD, PhD (Johns Hopkins University), Member-at-Large, Liaison to the Industry Advisory Committee
• Priscilla Markwood, CAE (Association of Pathology Chairs), Member-at-Large, APC representative

Policies

• Code of Conduct
• Antitrust Compliance

Questions? Contact the GOAL Office at: [email protected]