HomeDate: 2022-04-27
The Government has been promoting large-scale biomedical data in recent years as a blueprint towards precision health and to improve health conditions in an aging population. The government commissioned Academia Sinica to establish the Taiwan Biobank in 2012, which has since recruited more than 160,000 participants and released more than 180 million data records for scientific studies. More than 350 publications in international journals have used Taiwan Biobank data. Today (April 27th), the Taiwan Biobank extends its recruitment efforts from the outside back to where it all began by inaugurating its latest recruitment station in the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of Academia Sinica. The new station will reduce the travel distance of participants from the eastern part of Taipei and the Keelung region and help achieve the goal of recruiting 200,000 participants by 2023.
To improve the quality of health care and achieve personalized medicine in practice are global trends in the medical industry. However, the support of health big data is necessary to achieve these lofty goals. According to Dr. Fu-tong Liu, Vice-President of Academia Sinica, high quality health data is not only a gold mine for researchers, but the analysis of large-scale biospecimens and associated health data also provides important indices for observing disease and health trends. Taiwan Biobank plays an important role in the collection of health big data. In addition to its biospecimen collection, the large variety of questionnaire data (which includes environment and lifestyle information) in combination with genetic variation data greatly enhances the data scope of intelligence medicine, which may provide clues into the causes of chronic diseases in the population and help the development of personalized medicine and precision health.
Taiwan Biobank operates more than 40 recruitment stations throughout Taiwan and the outer islands which are responsible for awareness promotion, participant recruitment and biospecimen/data collection. For the past 10 years, through the effort of its nearly 100 recruiters working over 170,000 person-hours and a series of standard operating procedures, Taiwan Biobank has been steadfast in its commitment to establish high-quality health big data with both breadth and depth. A long-term follow-up mechanism to obtain specimens and data from the same participant at different time points is also employed to obtain deep sequential data which is invaluable towards understanding the cause of diseases. According to Dr. Te-Chang Lee, Director of the Taiwan Biobank, Taiwan may be a small island, but its highly diverse population represents most Chinese ethnicities, which account for 22% of the world's population, making it one of the most valuable biobanks in the world. The inauguration of the Academia Sinica recruitment station shall improve local participation and provide a solid support for precision health research.
