Ganna heads up a major effort to pool COVID-19 patients’ genetic data from around the world. The idea “came quite spontaneously” about 2 weeks ago when “everyone was sitting at their computers watching this crisis,” says Ganna, who is also affiliated with the Broad Institute, a U.S. genomic powerhouse.
He and FIMM Director Mark Daly quickly created a
website for their project, the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative, and reached out to colleagues who run large biobank studies that follow thousands of volunteers for years to look for links between their DNA and health. At least a dozen biobanks, mostly in Europe and the United States, have expressed interest in contributing COVID-19 data from participants who agreed to this. Among them are FinnGen, which has DNA samples and health data for 5% of the 5 million–person Finnish population, and the 50,000-participant biobank at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The UK Biobank, one of world’s largest with DNA data
for 500,000 participants, also plans to add COVID-19 health data from participants to its data set, the project
tweeted this month. And the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics, which is
helping test much of the nation’s population to see who is infected with the new coronavirus, has received government permission to add these data and any subsequent COVID-19 symptoms to its database, which contains genome and health data on half of Iceland’s 364,000 inhabitants, says its CEO Kári Stefánsson. “We will do our best to contribute to figuring this out,” Stefánsson says.
