Dive Brief:
- The NIH awarded the Mayo Clinic $142 million over five years to serve as the national biobank for the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, according to a recent announcement.
- The biobank aims to collect specimens from at least 1 million Americans, and use them to study individual variations in response to disease and treatment.
- President Obama announced the PMI during his 2015 State of the Union address.
Dive Insight:
Most of the samples will be stored at Mayo Clinic’s Minnesota campus, but about 20% to 25% will be stored in Florida to protect against loss if a localized natural disaster occurred.
Volunteers will provide personal health information, submit to a physical exam, and agree to share their electronic health records (EHRs).
Stephen Thibodeau, co-director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine Biorepositories Program, said in a release that the clinic’s “facilities are built to serve as a vital resource for storing and analyzing all biospecimens, under the highest-level quality possible and to minimize loss, damage, or contamination, with the ability to retrieve them efficiently for research use.”
NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement that additional awards will be announced this summer for the PMI Cohort Program Coordinating Center, Participant Technologies Center, and Healthcare Provider Organization Enrollment Centers.
“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," Collins said.
The program is set to kick off officially later this year.
Last week, the administration released the data policy framework for establishing security expectations for organizations in PMI.