The newly launched facility marks a significant stride towards building India’s own longitudinal health database.
- It will enhance India’s capabilities in precision medicine and biomedical research.
About National Biobank
- Launched under: Phenome India Project
- It is based on the UK Biobank model, but customized for Indian diversity.
- Purpose: It will aid in early diagnosis, improve therapeutic targeting, and bolster the fight against complex diseases such as diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular ailments, and rare genetic disorders.
- It will generate high-resolution data that can power AI-driven diagnostics and gene-guided therapies.
- Coverage: It will collect comprehensive genomic, lifestyle, and clinical data from 10,000 individuals.
About Phenome India Project
- It is officially called as Phenome India-CSIR Health Cohort Knowledgebase (PI-CheCK).
- Launched by: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 2023.
- Objective: It is designed to be a long-term, data-rich study tracking the health trajectories of individuals over several years.
What is Phenome?
- Phenome is the entire set of phenotypes in a cell, tissue, organ, organism or species.
- Phenotype refers to the observable physical characteristics of an organism.
- These include the organism's appearance, development, and behavior.
- An organism's phenotype is determined by its genotype (set of genes the organism carries) as well as by environmental influences upon these genes.