A website developed by Boston University and the National Institutes of Health will include a worldwide collection of genetic and clinical data to allow researchers to compare their findings.
The website – the SNP Health Association Resource, or SHARe, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute – was launched Oct. 1 after two years of work. Aiming to aid in the advancement of personalized medical care, the network – named after a genome – is based on patients’ genetic profiles.
“SHARe is the latest attempt to find the genetic components of important public health diseases,” said BU School of Medicine professor Dr. Larry Atwood. “We are far and away the largest [study], in terms of the amount of data that we have on many different diseases.
“We can see the transmission of genes from generation to generation,” he added.
Atwood, who was the Framingham Heart Study associate director, said he has collected almost 60 years’ worth of data from 15,000 people over three generations. SHARe will combine his study’s extensive findings with medical studies around the world.
“It’s not as simple as one gene for heart disease. There are dozens for each one of these diseases,” said Atwood, who has taken a year off from teaching to concentrate on the project. “Really, the entire world needs to collaborate closely and share all of their results and their data in order to make progress.”
Dr. Sudha Seshadri, who leads the neurology effort in the study, said Framingham researchers cannot analyze their multitude of data alone.
“Making this information available to the whole world would increase the speed at which discoveries would emerge,” Seshadri said.
Dr. Christopher O’Donnell, co-scientific director of the project, described the study as a “perfect storm of research opportunity.”
“Framingham scientists, which include BU scientists, plan to use this database to discover new genes that underlie cardiovascular, lung and other major diseases,” he said.
Although the database is not available to the public, SHARe allows international researchers to access information from the study on each of the 550,000 points of interest. Researchers could use the database to investigate a patient’s genetic risk for a certain health condition such as heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
NHLBI plans to add more large population-based studies to the database to validate particular findings and make discoveries at a faster rate.
Seshadri said she anticipates many possibilities in SHARe’s future.
“It’s been a lot of work over the last year and a half to make this happen,” she said. “The happiness will probably come over the next few years [when] the data is used to make a lot of findings.”
On a worldwide front, O’Donnell said several other studies, including one with more than 10,000 participants from the Netherlands, have shown interest in SHARe.
“It’s really a wonderful opportunity that comes along once in a lifetime, for a scientist to be at the very ground floor of a project like this,” Atwood said.