My thanks to the delegates of the second Genomics of Common Diseases Conference:

Many thanks to all of you, the participants, a highly interconnected network of collaborators and competitors who form a core area of Nature Genetics’s content. You are our readers, authors and referees. That core, like the journal, is expanding internationally. Just as, when we send your research to review, we try to add a new referee alongside those experienced and calibrated experts we have relied upon to produce papers that are useful research tools; I hope that you will be able to extend your networks of excellence in a similar manner.

It is fascinating to see these collaborative networks built by the NHGRI, the Broad, and Wellcome, extend internationally to address diseases that are of local concern: malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, diabetes and cancer. As the techniques develop, these long-range collaborations can meet with success.

But, I know from lab visits in many countries that building local capacity matters a great deal to developing and emerging nations. As DNA sequencing becomes cheaper and the tools of discovery become reliable commodities, it is populations with particular characteristics and demographics that are crucial. Here I would cite the success of the Pan-Asian SNP initiative from Singapore in mobilizing the participation of regional collaborators, the new genome centers of Mexico, South Africa and several nations in the Arab world, building centers of excellence to address genetic problems of local significance. These patterns of collaboration go beyond the paradigm of long-range collaboration with established experts in developed countries to build sutainable capacity with immediate neighbors.

For a developing nation, making an essential contribution to the global understanding of our shared human genome is an important source of pride. With the new concentration on genomics come beneficial coat-tail effects: education and provision of primary health care. So, I hope you will join me in a toast to international collaboration with a commitment to capacity building, in the hope that we can make some of these common diseases less common.