Healthcare systems in the developed countries are facing growing challenges due to rising costs of treatments, aging populations and shortage of health care personnel. All this accentuates the need to develop early diagnostics and effective prevention for common chronic diseases. One of the suggested solutions has been wider use of genomics. At present, genomic medicine mainly serves to improve diagnostics of rare diseases but new developments seem to offer hope for possibilities to implement genomics also to improve population health. A solution is screening for risk individuals in biobanks and approaching them to offer prevention and treatment. Legislation as well as collecting biobank samples is well advanced in Estonia and Finland making them excellent environments to start implementation of genomics to population health.
In Estonia, Human Gene Research Act was approved 2001 and Estonian Genome Center was established. Today the Estonian Biobank has samples from over 200 000 people (about 20% of the adult population), and rich health, health behavioral and environmental data has been collected from all of them. All samples have been genotyped with GSA array and data are imputed against the Estonian whole genome sequence reference. Two nationwide pilot projects for implementation of the data to personalized medicine/personalized prevention have been conducted based on biobank participants and plans for implementation of the results in health care as a general service are underway with goal to start it from 2023.
Finnish public entities, Universities and Research Institutes have for decades collected large studies with biological samples, including DNA and many other kinds, and the collection is on-going facilitated by the nation-wide project FinnGen. There are both population-based and disease-oriented collections and they have been biobanked under the current Finnish Biobank Act. This resource, samples and genotype data, of some 400.000 individuals can be linked using the unique personal identification code to the nation-wide health registers for scientific studies. Finnish health registries are validated and quality controlled and are usable for scientific studies under the new Finnish law for the secondary use of data.
The aim of this Mini Theme “Can population health be personalized? Estonia and Finland as examples” is to describe some of the first experiences of implementing (Estonia) use of genomic data at the level of the population health care as well a pilot (Finland) to develop processes and tools for population-wide use of genomics. The papers will also touch the complicated questions of cost-effectiveness of genomic approaches in preventing/postponing chronic diseases.
In addition, the Mini Theme will discuss the role of biobanks in this endeavor and how to educate the present health care staff for the possible new tasks. Interested researchers can suggest papers relating to implementing genomics to healthcare in Finland and Estonia
Please consider that this Mini Theme will only consider submissions coming from invited authors.
Healthcare systems in the developed countries are facing growing challenges due to rising costs of treatments, aging populations and shortage of health care personnel. All this accentuates the need to develop early diagnostics and effective prevention for common chronic diseases. One of the suggested solutions has been wider use of genomics. At present, genomic medicine mainly serves to improve diagnostics of rare diseases but new developments seem to offer hope for possibilities to implement genomics also to improve population health. A solution is screening for risk individuals in biobanks and approaching them to offer prevention and treatment. Legislation as well as collecting biobank samples is well advanced in Estonia and Finland making them excellent environments to start implementation of genomics to population health.
In Estonia, Human Gene Research Act was approved 2001 and Estonian Genome Center was established. Today the Estonian Biobank has samples from over 200 000 people (about 20% of the adult population), and rich health, health behavioral and environmental data has been collected from all of them. All samples have been genotyped with GSA array and data are imputed against the Estonian whole genome sequence reference. Two nationwide pilot projects for implementation of the data to personalized medicine/personalized prevention have been conducted based on biobank participants and plans for implementation of the results in health care as a general service are underway with goal to start it from 2023.
Finnish public entities, Universities and Research Institutes have for decades collected large studies with biological samples, including DNA and many other kinds, and the collection is on-going facilitated by the nation-wide project FinnGen. There are both population-based and disease-oriented collections and they have been biobanked under the current Finnish Biobank Act. This resource, samples and genotype data, of some 400.000 individuals can be linked using the unique personal identification code to the nation-wide health registers for scientific studies. Finnish health registries are validated and quality controlled and are usable for scientific studies under the new Finnish law for the secondary use of data.
The aim of this Mini Theme “Can population health be personalized? Estonia and Finland as examples” is to describe some of the first experiences of implementing (Estonia) use of genomic data at the level of the population health care as well a pilot (Finland) to develop processes and tools for population-wide use of genomics. The papers will also touch the complicated questions of cost-effectiveness of genomic approaches in preventing/postponing chronic diseases.
In addition, the Mini Theme will discuss the role of biobanks in this endeavor and how to educate the present health care staff for the possible new tasks. Interested researchers can suggest papers relating to implementing genomics to healthcare in Finland and Estonia
Please consider that this Mini Theme will only consider submissions coming from invited authors.