BBMRI.ee: Estonian Biobank has now recruited over 200,000 biobank participants and all will be genotyped by June 2020
Estonian Biobank is a population-based biobank of the Institute of Genomics at the University of Tartu, established in year 2000. The entire project is conducted according to the legislation, the Estonian Human Genes Research Act, and all biobank participants have signed a broad consent form. The first set of 52,000 biobank participants were recruited over a 10-year period (2002-2011).
The next phase of recruitment started in 2018 and when an additional 150+ thousand people joined the biobank. In total, it makes about 20% of the adult population in Estonia. In 2109, recruitment will continue, but with a slower pace. All biobank participants DNA samples will be genotyped by Illumina Global Screening Array and by the end of 2020 all data, including EHR and questionnaire data, should be available for research.
The goal of this initiative is to use the genetic data together with the environmental and health behavior data as the basis for implementing the personal medicine and personal prevention programs in Estonia. The government of Estonia plans to accelerate the development of personalized medicine and use genetic information as a part of personal medicine and prevention in improving the population health in coming years. The necessary IT solutions are in preparation and first projects (CAD and breast cancer) are ongoing in the clinical setting in the two largest hospitals in Estonia. We are prepared to deliver polygenic risk scores and drug response based on pharmacogenomic analysis. All genetic information is coming from GSA arrays, which were imputed against the Estonian WGS reference database (Mitt et al. 2017). This large, ambitious project is coordinated by the Ministry of Social Affairs, the National Institute for Health Development and the University of Tartu.