Building Big Data, One Swab at a Time
Mar 14, 2013, 2:00 PM, Posted by Nancy Barrand
When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched the Pioneer Portfolio, my colleagues and I asked ourselves what fields might produce the greatest potential game-changers for health and health care. Genomics was at the top of the list. The human genome had been mapped and fantastic discoveries had begun to blossom, but a true era of personalized medicine still seemed too far off.
So we set out to do what Pioneer does best. We explored and learned. We networked. We asked a lot of questions. And we began to hunt down ideas.
On March 12, PBS NewsHour did a feature story on one of the big ideas that came out of that process: the world’s largest, deepest, and most diverse “biobank.” It presented a good opportunity to share the backstory.