The Tohoku Medical Megabank Project is a national project in Japan, which started in 2012.[1] The mission of the Tohoku Medical Megabank (TMM) project is to carry out a long-term health survey in the Miyagi and Iwate prefectures, which were affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, and provide the research infrastructure for the development of personalized medicine by establishing a biobank and conducting cohort studies.[2][3]
The TMM project is conducted by Tohoku University's Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (ToMMo) and Iwate Medical University's Iwate Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization (IMM).
The following cohort studies and research projects are in progress or completed.
The study recruited over 80,000 participants, with 50,000 from Miyagi Prefecture and 30,000 from Iwate Prefecture.
The study recruited over 70,000 participants, including over 23,000 newborns and their parents, siblings, grandparents, and extended family members.[3]
The project has been collecting various specimens, including peripheral and cord blood mononuclear cells, Buffy coat, plasma, serum, urine, breast milk, and saliva.[2]
The project provides allele frequencies of SNVs (single nucleotide variants) and short INDELs (insertions/deletions) detected by short-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) analysis of 54,000 Japanese individuals, as well as allele frequencies of structural variants detected by long-read WGS analysis of 222 individuals.[7]
The project designed ethnic-specific SNP arrays optimized for the Japanese population and performed a series of GWAS analyses with the cohort samples.[8]
The project constructed a reference genome for Japanese by integrating de novo assemblies of three Japanese individuals.
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023