Mayo Clinic lands $142 million from NIH to build precision medicine biobank
The National Institutes of Health announced May 27 it would award $142 million to the Mayo Clinic to establish the world’s largest research-cohort biobank for precision medicine.
The five year initiative aims to enroll 1 million or more U.S. participants to help researchers study individual differences in health and disease.
“This range of information at the scale of 1 million people will be an unprecedented resource for researchers working to understand all the factors that influence health and disease,” NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, said in a statement. “The more we understand about individual differences, the better able we will be to tailor the prevention and treatment of illness.”
[Also: Geisinger takes giant steps toward precision medicine with its EHR-linked genomic initiative.]
The Mayo Clinic will provide the infrastructure to store, analyze and make available to researchers more than 35 million biospecimens and associated data, and it will employ state-of-the-art laboratory automation and robotics for efficient processing and retrieval.
Stephen N. Thibodeau, co-director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine Biorepositories Program, and Mine Cicek, director of the Mayo Clinic Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing Core Laboratory, will oversee the biobank. Thibodeau also will serve on the PMI Cohort Program Steering Committee to help guide the program’s plans and activities.
NIH said it will announce later this summer the funding awards for the PMI Cohort Program Coordinating Center, Participant Technologies Center and Healthcare Provider Organization Enrollment Centers.
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Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com
