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Over the past decade, Kaiser Permanente has spent more than $4 billion building the world’s largest private-sector collection of electronic health-care records. The data have become the cornerstone of a new scientific resource: a biobank that links the health records of more than 210,000 Kaiser members with samples of their DNA. The Oakland (Calif.)-based health network has teamed up with the University of California at San Francisco so scientists can use the collection to search for the genetic roots of diseases including glaucoma and prostate cancer.
Kaiser has 9.5 million enrollees in eight states and the District of Columbia, and members can see a wide variety of medical specialists without leaving the network. Every visit, lab test, prescription, and procedure is logged into a member’s electronic health record. This gives Kaiser an edge over other genomics projects, which besides collecting DNA samples must go through the expense and trouble of amassing information on subjects’ medical history. Last year biologist Craig Venter founded Human Longevity, with plans to sequence the genomes of as many as 100,000 people annually, and this summer,...