Research infrastructure Personalised screening, risk prediction, and understanding disease trajectories for early detection of disease - An integrated cohort approach.
The Faculty of Medicine together with Region Västerbotten has launched a strategic initiative in 2020 to enhance the use of biobank samples in conjunction to health data towards precision health and precision medicine. This is well in line with the Swedish Life science strategy and the aim of PREDICT is to understand the development of disease, find biomarkers for early detection and understand comorbidities.
PREDICT stems from a vision to strengthen life science and improve health through the use of existing biobanks in the county of Västerbotten, which, together, represents a unique resource in terms of size, longevity and availability of repeated samples. These resources places Västerbotten in a strategic position for world-class precision medicine research into blood tests for precision screening and early detection of disease.
During 2021 we are creating a case-cohort with approximately 32,500 cases all different types of diseases that is compared towards a set of 7500 cohort controls. Researchers have applied to be coordinators for different types of areas of expertise and diseases, that are dedicated to developing research within their research area, expanding on national and international collaborations.
The PREDICT infrastructure aims to use unique population-based biobanks of unparalleled size and quality with extensive phenotype data as a platform to identify genetic, metabolic, and proteomic biomarker panels.
The study design provides a cost-efficient combination of existing resources using several case sets towards a common set of controls. The data from the cases and controls will be enriched by potentially integrating data in some projects from several mature cohorts with long follow-up and established hard endpoint data from several sources, such as linking the case cohort to other studies as U-CAN, VIPVIZA, Betula and SCAPIS for different subsets of patients.
Through a joint effort by Umeå University, Region Västerbotten and individual research groups, we can make sure our valuable local resources are for optimal use in research, and by finding important biomarkers linked to disease, ultimately contribute to improved health in our population.
If you have questions or are interested in collaboration please contact:
Elin Thysell, Senior research engineer
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