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Taiwan invests in genetic resource for health

A large biobanking effort captures genetic and health data from half a million people in Taiwan, widening the diversity of genomes used to predict disease risk.
By
  1. Genevieve L. Wojcik

    1. Genevieve L. Wojcik is in the Department of Epidemiology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA.

Discovering genetic variants that are involved in health-related traits relies on analysing genetic and health information from large cohorts of people. However, there has long been an imbalance of genetic ancestries represented in this kind of research, which has excluded large groups of humanity from the downstream benefits1. Millions of genetic variants differ in frequency around the world owing to complex demographic processes, such as migration, that depend on geographic proximity and shared histories. Therefore, variants found to be associated with a trait in one population could be less frequent or completely absent in another. Including under-studied populations in genetic resources enhances scientists’ ability to discover and precisely map variants that are potentially responsible for health traits and diseases2. Two articles in Nature3,4 demonstrate the power of a new large-scale study of an under-studied population: the Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative (TPMI), which consists of genetic and electronic medical-record data from about half a million participants across Taiwan.

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Nature 648, 49-50 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-03447-0

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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