Exploring the power of a global biobank through a collaborative analysis of >2 million of individuals: the Global Biobank Meta-Analysis Network

With electronic health records and questionnaires linked to genomic data, biobanks provide unprecedented opportunities for systematically understanding genetic and environmental contributions to complex diseases. While a unified effort is ideal to enhance power for genetic and epidemiology studies, several challenges have to be faced. In particular, biobanks collect samples of different ancestry, have different ascertainment scheme, different phenotype collection and definition, and have applied different technologies and statistical approach to characterize the genetic component. How all these differences will affect a unified effort in genetic and epidemiological studies of common and rare diseases, is currently unknown. The Global Biobank Meta-analysis Initiative aims to create a framework to jumpstart global biobank collaboration. The benefits include better power for genome-wide association studies (GWASs), GWASs of understudied diseases, the opportunity for cross-validation, improvements in fine-mapping, and potential to explore subgroup analyses. The effort is led by Prof. Mark Daly and Prof. Benjamin Neale. Several biobanks (>10,000 samples) have committed to this project so far, including Biobank Japan, BioME (USA), BioVu (USA), China Kadoorie, Colorado Biobank (USA), deCODE Genetics (Iceland), East London Genes & Health (UK), Estonian Biobank, FinnGen (Finland), Generation Scotland, HUNT (Norway), Mexico City, Michigan Genomics Initiative (USA), Million Veteran Program (USA), Partners Biobank (USA), UCLA Precision Health Biobank (USA) and UK Biobank, bringing the total sample size to more than 2 million. We would like to contribute to this effort using the Lifelines biobank. The map below depicts the location of biobanks that have joined the Global Biobank Initiative.