A Gene Bank That Offers Free Withdrawals

摘要

Over the past decade, Kaiser Permanente has spent more than $4 billion building the world's largest private-sector collection of electronic health-care records. The data have become the cornerstone of a new scientific resource: a biobank that links the health records of more than 210,000 Kaiser members with samples of their DNA. The Oakland (Calif.)-based health network has teamed up with the University of California at San Francisco so scientists can use the collection to search for the genetic roots of diseases including glaucoma and prostate cancer.