Launched in 2019, Accelerating Research in Genomic Oncology (ARGO) is the next phase of the International Cancer Genome Consortium, which aims to uniformly analyse specimens from 100,000 cancer patients with high quality clinical data to address outstanding questions that are vital to our quest to defeat cancer. ICGC ARGO will use key clinical questions and patient clinical data to drive the interrogation of cancer genomes and bring experts together to translate this knowledge in a way that impacts patients. One year on the project has made considerable progress, and as of August 2020 now has 25 programs enrolled across 13 countries, with 58,300 donors committed. These programs are investigating over 20 different tumour types, and range in structure from established genomic oncology platforms, regulatory clinical trials and global tumour consortia. Specifically, many programs are focused on priority areas within their jurisdiction and those that represent key outstanding challenges in cancer genomics such as difficult to treat cancers; drug resistance and high mortality cancers, ethnic diversity and geographically prevalent cancers in distinct parts of the world. These will provide unique and diverse datasets harmonised across multiple continents. Major milestones include successfully implementing a revised governance structure, establishing guidelines around 11 key areas of policy, development of the clinical data model and associated data dictionary and development of data management infrastructure. Notably, the Data Coordination Centre launched the ARGO Data Platform which manages the submission, processing, analysis, and dissemination of clinical and molecular data, in June this year. This coincided with Data Release 1.0, which includes data on 177 donors across 2 programs analysed against GRCh38.

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