Approved Research

Comparing genome architecture across diverse populations between the UK Biobank and the Biobank at the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine (CCPM)

Lay summary

The Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine (CCPM) aims to advance the health of individuals, families, and communities by integrating multi-omics with detailed participant information. Established in 2014, CCPM, together with the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the local healthcare system UCHealth, brings together health records from our diverse region with a biospecimen repository for research, clinical, and educational use.

As a genome-centered team, we focus on mapping genetic and environmental determinants of health and disease, developing and improving statistical approaches to large-scale multivariable and multi-omic data, harnessing genomics to inform our understanding of human diversity, and predicting disease risk and health outcomes to improve clinical care.

Together with our local biobank, we will utilize the complementary prospective and in-depth design of UK Biobank and its full dataset to support our joint missions to advance modern medicine and treatment through scientific discovery.

Specifically, we will identify novel determinants of human health, develop methods to improve multi-omic analysis, compare statistical association results across disease and trait domains from genetic ancestry-matched or self-identified race/ethnic groups as appropriate, and importantly share approaches and discoveries with UK Biobank, the scientific community, and the general public for collective and global human health advancement. Importantly, contrasting the two datasets gives us an opportunity to understand differences in healthcare utilization or access patterns across both countries.