The University of California, Irvine (UCI) College of Medicine announced that First Genetic Trust (FGT) is now a technology partner to collaborate on UCI's programs for advancing research and data management capabilities for clinical and research networks. FGT will provide UCI with the enTRUST(R) Genetic Banking platform, and expertise in development related to the UCI's long-term objectives in informatics and bioinformatics. FGT also will partner with UCI to commercialize technologies and certain data assets for sponsored research. "First Genetic Trust brings technical expertise and platforms that will further enhance UCI's existing strengths in technology and research," said Hoda Anton-Culver, Ph.D., Professor and Chief of the Epidemiology Division at UCI, and Director of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Institute (GERI) at UCI. "The combination of FGT's enTRUST(R) platform for study management and genetic banking with UCI's technologies for research, data management and clinical network administration, will bring a new state-of-the-art to collaborative clinical research." UCI and FGT will also work on developing technology interfaces to allow institutions to expand their collaborative research and data sharing capabilities using national data standards, which are core elements of the recently published NIH Roadmap. "We are very pleased to be working with UCI on such a high impact program," said Aris Floratos, Ph.D., Vice-President of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology for FGT. "Dr. Anton-Culver's team is renowned for their development of leading-edge clinical research technologies. This collaboration is an opportunity to leverage advanced knowledge management technologies in a way that will have direct impact on clinical research, and ultimately on the quality of health care delivered to patients."