The ARGO Vision
We know each cancer is different, yet we treat them much the same. A major challenge is that we don’t have the information to know ahead of time which treatments will work and which won't.
The ARGO project is a new phase of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. Launched in 2019 after 10 successful years of the ICGC mapping genomic alterations that characterise over 50 cancer types. The time has now come to translate this knowledge to improve outcomes for people affected by cancer.
Mission
ICGC ARGO will uniformly analyze specimens from 100,000 cancer patients with high quality clinical data to address outstanding questions that are vital to our quest to defeat cancer.
Over the next ten years ICGC ARGO aims to deliver a million patient-years of precision oncology knowledge to the world, by making data available to the entire research community in a rapid and responsible way, to accelerate research into the causes and control of cancer.
Read more about our goals
Our History
The original initiative (known as the ICGC 25k Project) was to define the genomes of 25,000 primary untreated cancers which to date has produced >20,000 tumour genomes for 26 cancer types. Learn more about the 25k Initiative in the 2010 Marker Paper.
ICGC 25k was the first step to broadly and comprehensively map the structural aberrations of genomes and begin to understand the molecular basis of cancer. Data generated through the ICGC has transformed research strategies in academia and industry alike, with hundreds of seminal works published directly using ICGC data, with landmark articles in the world’s elite scientific journals. No therapeutic is developed today without, in some way, applying the knowledge that ICGC has provided the world.