The NIH Precision Medicine Initiative www.whitehouse.gov/precision-medicine is going to award $142 million over five years to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to establish the biobank for the PMI Cohort Program www.nih.gov/precision-medicine-initiative-cohort-program.
The PMI cohort program is a longitudinal research study that is going to enroll one million or more U.S participants to advance precision medicine. The funding will support the collection, storage, and distribution for research use of biological samples known as biospecimens.
Laboratory analyses of the biospecimens, including chemical and genetic tests will be a key component of the core PMI Cohort Program data set. This data combines information such as lifestyle and health questionnaires, medication history, EHRs physical exams, environmental exposures, and real-time physiology tracked through mobile health technologies to help researchers study individual differences in health and disease.
“This range of information at the scale of one million people will be an unprecedented resource for researchers working to understand all the factors that influence health and disease,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD. “The more we understand about individual differences, the better able we will be to tailor the prevention and treatment of illness.”
Mayo Clinic will provide the infrastructure to store, analyze and make available to researchers more than 35 million biospecimens and associated data using state-of-the-art laboratory automation and robotics for efficient processing and retrieval.
Additionally, the Mayo Clinic’s www.mayoclinic.org Florida Biospecimen Accessioning and Processing Core Laboratory, will provide sample storage for 20-25 percent of the collection in order to protect the national resource from a localized natural disaster.