Sanger Genomics Futures Workshops

Genomics Futures Series

From February to July 2025 Wellcome Sanger Institute and Wellcome hosted the Genomics Futures workshop series, inviting a breadth of professionals including genomics researchers, industry professionals, policy makers and ethicists were invited to explore the future genomics landscape.

The outputs of these workshops are available here for use, interest and to spark discussion within the wider scientific community.

Reflecting on 25 years since the first draft of the human genome was released, the pace of molecular biology and DNA sequencing has accelerated and genomic analysis is yielding unprecedented insights.

Looking to the future

In these times of seemingly perpetual advances, we might benefit from standing still, and looking not backwards but forward.

What will be the scientific revolution(s) of the next 25 years and what do we need to deliver this future?
How can we avoid inequalities so that everyone around the world benefits from the next wave of genomic innovations?
And how do we conduct our research so that an informed public can engage with, and support this research?

These are some of the questions that inspired the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Wellcome to run the Genomics Futures series, a collaborative horizon scanning initiative to explore and debate the possibilities of genomics for the next 25 years.

The Workshops

The series comprised six workshops that invited 133 participants from 86 different organisations and 24 countries and 6 continents to offer their perspectives and identify opportunities for genomics over the next 25 years as well as identifying the possible barriers and bottlenecks.

Reaching beyond the normal grant or review cycle which only looks 5-10 years at most into the future, we wanted participants to think explicitly about the long term. This also presented an opportunity to explore the future Genomics landscape from a wide range of perspectives identifying potential barriers and opportunities and proposing any immediate actions for progression.

The workshops addressed six distinct areas of genomics and the wider research ecosystem. The discussions and ideas are explored on the pages linked to below, along with cross-cutting themes that are vital to each area.

We hope the discussions and ideas of this workshop series will catalyse conversations across the research community to realise the full potential of genomics to deliver medical, biological and societal benefit for the world.