Proceedings of the 19th and 20th International Stroke Genetics Consortium Workshops

The 19th and 20th Workshops of the International Stroke Genetics Consortium (ISGC) were held on April 28–29 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by Christopher Anderson and Steven Lubitz, and on November 3–4 in Milan, Italy, hosted by Giorgio Boncoraglio. These Workshops are a semiannual tradition of the ISGC, dating back to the founding meeting of the Consortium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 2007. The ISGC is a worldwide collaboration of stroke physicians and scientists who have agreed to pool resources and expertise in an effort to unravel the genetic basis of stroke (http://www.strokegenetics.org). As such, members pursue their own research as well as come together under the ISGC banner to conduct larger, collaborative studies. Herein, we present the Proceedings and official published abstracts of the 19th and 20th Workshops of the ISGC. Where topics were presented twice in one year, the latter abstract was included.

The ISGC is proud of its track record in the development and cultivation of junior members, and offers travel scholarships to one to two trainees/new investigators per year. Many of the abstracts in these Proceedings reflect the contributions of our active junior investigators. With the state-of-the-art for complex disease genetics in a state of nearly constant flux, the ISGC Workshops offer a welcoming and open haven for our members to exchange ideas, present interim results, and discuss new initiatives as we strive toward our ultimate goal of leveraging genetic discoveries to improve the prevention and treatment of stroke and cerebrovascular disease.

The ISGC Workshops of 2016 were united across two salient themes: the leveraging of large repositories of multi-ethnic stroke samples from investigators all over the globe, and our continuing quest to make the primary data and results of ISGC analyses readily available to the broadest possible community through the NINDS-funded “Platform for Accelerating Genetic Discovery for Cerebrovascular Disease.” Indeed, during the 20th Workshop, a voice vote unanimously endorsed the principle of rapid and wide sharing of all data generated through the ISGC. With new members joining from Biobank Japan, the China-Kadoorie Biobank, and UK Biobank, to name a few, sample sizes for common variant genetic association in stroke are reaching numbers that seemed implausible when the organization was first founded, and now extend the reach of our analyses far beyond restricted populations of European ancestry. 2016 has also seen many of our members look toward exciting future strategies. With new initiatives in whole genome sequencing of stroke subjects, and novel functional approaches to define the biological consequences of observed genetic associations, ISGC members are working to keep pace with the relentless progress in human disease genetics.

Publication of these Proceedings in Neurology® Genetics increases the audience and maximizes the impact of the ISGC Workshops to our peer scientific communities, and we welcome the opportunity to share our results and ideas. On behalf of the ISGC Steering Committee and its many members, we hope that you enjoy reviewing our Proceedings and we welcome any opportunities for collaborative growth.

• © 2017 American Academy of Neurology