Sequencing everyone remains prohibitively expensive, researchers say.ĭata included for everyone in the Maryland biobank will come from saliva samples, medical records and surveys about how people live. In some cases, the participants at the national and state level have their whole genome sequenced, giving researchers a complete genetic blueprint for someone's body. Josh Denny, CEO of the All of Us Research Program, in a statement. 'The combination of data in the All of Us dataset-provided by participants from a wide range of communities and backgrounds-offers researchers an unprecedented resource to study how different aspects of our lives influence health outcomes,' said Dr. The size of the bank is what will help researchers, officials said at the time. The bank also is offering 57,600 responses to a survey of social determinants of health, such as how people access food, their level of safety and their experiences with health care discrimination. Last month, the national biobank made data from nearly 20,000 people with COVID-19 available to researchers studying prevention, progression of the disease and so-called long COVID, when people suffer new or continuing symptoms for a prolonged period after the initial infection. That bank aims to enroll a million people and has signed up several hundred thousand participants. The biobank is being developed and run independently but follows development of other state-level banks and a national bank launched by the National Institutes of Health in 2018 called All of Us. The project is called My Healthy Maryland and is a collaboration among the school of medicine, the University of Maryland Medical Center and the 13-hospital University of Maryland Medical System. 'We also expect it will help us accelerate our understanding of how individuals and their health care providers can use information about genetic variation to predict, prevent, detect and treat disease.' 'This is an opportunity for the diverse Maryland community to team up with researchers to better understand how our biology, lifestyle and local environment affect our health,' said Toni Pollin, a study co-leader and associate professor of medicine in the medical school. Some of that already happens, as increasing use of genetic testing allows doctors to know, for example, who is predisposed by their genes to breast or some other kinds of cancers. The ambitious effort would collect not only genetic information, but also medical, environmental and lifestyle data for a so-called biobank that researchers could use to spot patterns in the population and better understand what ails us.Įventually, scientists, drug companies, geneticists and others could use findings to develop interventions for groups of people and tailor care for individuals, an idea known as precision or individualized medicine.

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