No body part left unturned

Palmer concedes that a population health study of 80,000 people isn’t huge by world standards, placing it around the middle of biobanks worldwide. The reason that Joondalup has attracted so much attention in the international biobanking arena is because of the density of data being collected.

Palmer describes the planned study as being “the most fully characterised human cohort resource of all the biobanks being planned or constructed. Basically we hope to have nearly every senior medical researcher in WA involved measuring every bit of relevant individual health data we can think of.”

Another important point about the WA biobank is its place in the global scheme, and organisations such as the P3G consortium (Public Population Program in Genomics) are key to this. P3G is currently the peak global biobanking body and Palmer sits on its board.

“P3G has made enormous progress made in harmonising questionnaires and testing for biobank participants, and in standardising aspects such as DNA collection,” he says. This means that data ultimately collected in the Joondalup Family Health Study will be directly comparable across biobanks globally.

“Researchers have come to realise that even a resource such as UK Biobank, which is collecting data from half a million people, will not have sufficient resolution to look at many less common diseases such as lung cancer. The only way that we can make these resources useful for diseases that are common, but not as common as type II diabetes, is to enable them to be used collaboratively.”

It seems that everybody has realised this is the only way that progress can be made, with even some of the large global pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline putting their genetic data on-line.

Palmer also highlighted that several additional and far-reaching benefits of what they are doing in WA are already emerging. “All of the infrastructure built with the Joondalup Family Health Study in mind with the help of series of enabling grants from NHMRC are also enabling and underpinning a huge amount of work going on elsewhere in Australia.”

Facilities such as the National Training Facility in Medical Informatics (AMBeR), the WA DNA Bank and the WA Genetic Epidemiology Resource are increasingly supporting other major initiatives such as the Australian Twin Register based in Melbourne, the Australasian Sleep Trials Networks, the Trans-Tasman Radiation Oncology Group, and the national networks for mesothelioma (GUARD) and brain cancer (AGOG).

“Australia is a small country with limited resources to put into research, but we have to be smart about our investment and go for things that we can be world class at, and this is one of those things,” Palmer says. “It is certainly pretty cool stuff and everyone is watching this space.”