Kaiser’s Massive Genetic Database Leverages Its Patient Population (But It’s A One Way Street)
This week MIT’s Technology Review featured a story about Kaiser Permanente and its plans to use its Northern California patients to construct an enormous genetic database. The acronym-unfriendly Research Program on Genes, Environment, & Health, or RPGEH is funded in large part by a $25 million NIH research grant courtesy of February’s stimulus bill. The program will genotype 100,000 patients using SNP array technology from Affymetrix. If all goes well, the project will expand to as many as 500,000 patients by 2013.
What makes the RPGEH proposal so exciting, from a research perspective, is not just the 700,000 SNPs that will be genotyped for 100,000 patients, although that alone would represent one of the largest genetic research databases currently in existence. The real value lies in the marrying of genetic information with robust medical, environmental and other phenotypic data that Kaiser already maintains as a health care provider. From the RPGEH’s official description:
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