(Photo: hanoimoi.com.vn)

The 4.5 million USD project was launched in December 2018 involving 40 scientists from universities and research institutes worldwide and hundreds of experts and volunteers in Vietnam.

For three years, they sequenced the genomes of more than 1,000 unrelated adults aged 35-55 and discovered more than 40 million genetic variants, nearly 2 million of them representative of the Vietnamese population, with annotations about biological functions and pathological risks.

Vu Ha Van, Science Director of VinBigData, said the research will lay a foundation for biomedical and precision medicine development and future treatment.  

Van said: “Doctors used to apply the same treatment method and prescribe the same medicine to every patient with a given disease. With enough genomic data, doctors can use different treatment methods with different groups of patients and increase the effectiveness of the outcomes.”

Part of the database is now available at genome.vinbigdata.org.