The Estonian government will allocate €5 million to a development project that aims to collect the genetic data of 100,000 people and integrate it into everyday medical practice by giving people feedback of their personal genetic risks.
The general purpose of the project is to boost the development of personalised medicine in Estonia, the country’s ministry of social affairs said in a statement.
The project aims to collect the DNA of 100,000 individuals and to generate personalised genetic reports for the participants using the Illumina Global Screening Array.
The goal of the project is to create a possibility to link genetic data with the Estonian National Health Information System, to enable physicians to take people’s personal genetic information into account when assessing the health risks of the patient.
The ministry of social affairs, the National Institute for Health Development and the University of Tartu will jointly implement the project. The collection, genotyping and initial analysis of gene samples will be managed by and done at the Estonian Genome Center of the University of Tartu, which already stores over 52,000 biological samples from the Estonian population.
The university will also contribute to the creation of a feedback system for the biobank participants, and to training of healthcare professionals for giving patients feedback based on genetic information. The official sample collection will start on 2 April 2018.
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Cover: Human DNA (the image is illustrative).
