From: Scientific American | Blog
It could help large institutions reach new insights into disease—but also make it harder for small labs with original ideas to compete for grants.
By Jim Kozubek
The National Institutes of Health this spring will start recruiting one million people in the United States to have their genomes sequenced, but also to provide their medical records and regular blood samples, and to submit to monitoring diet, physical activity, heart rate and blood pressure. The $1.455 billion, 10-year All of Us Research Program will create the largest and most diverse dataset of its kind, and could provide new insights into diseases. But such big data projects tend to overpromise, while dedicating so much of the NIH budget to large institutional controls and players makes it harder for smaller labs with original hypotheses to win grant money and compete in science.
The building of such “biobanks” of patient data is consistent with trends in science toward large institutional projects with objectives determined by hierarchy and rank; these projects recall the public-private race to sequence the human genome, but also projects such as ENCODE, which benefit high-profile labs over the course of decades. The Veterans Affairs Department, another public research department, began the Million Veteran Program and has so far recruited 650,000 vets with plans to sequence the DNA of 100,000 participants in the next two years, through contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton. Health insurers such as Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger Health are building genetic datasets in conjunction with patient medical records. Companies such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, deCode Genetics, a subsidiary of Amgen, and Patients Like Me, are also creating large genetic databases.
Leave a Reply