A poll indicates 90 percent of 1.4 million Estonians like the idea of a big project with potential benefits to themselves, and that also helps the country's fledgling biotech industry. Individuals may freely access their own data, otherwise strictly secret, and get word if project research yields treatments that might be beneficial. The Estonian Genebank Foundation officially opens in March in the city of Tartu. Which diseases the 10,000-patient pilot project will focus on hasn't been decided, but the search for volunteers will take advantage of patient group registries for cancer, Parkinson's disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes. When many genes influence an illness, as in heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, population genotyping is preferable to family studies.
Family studies work well when a single gene underlies a disease.
They rely on linkage analysis, where researchers find genetic markers matching disease inheritance patterns, and then use the markers to map the chromosomal region containing the gene as the first step toward its isolation. With polygenic diseases, where individual alleles seldom sharply increase the relative risk of disease, correlating genetic markers and inherited predisposition to disease requires genotyping hundreds or thousands of people. Finding genes exerting relatively small effects on diseases means scanning the entire genome. Depending on how completely the chosen SNPs cover the genome, genotyping most of Estonia could conceivably require billions of assays. These decisions will depend heavily on the preferences and resources of the eventual commercial partners.