The Belgian Genome Biobank (BGB) project, funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), aims to create a genomic resource of the Flemish/Belgian population in a secure compute environment, with the objective of supporting and performing genetic and health studies, in order to enable future research on genetic causes and (risk) factors for human traits, diseases and their environmental interactions.

The continued characterisation of population-specific genetic associations will be key for precision medicine. Variations between populations in disease prevalence and distribution of genetic variants necessitates access to population-based genetic reference datasets. As such data and infrastructure is currently not available for the Flemish/Belgian population, the Belgian Genome Biobank project will not only fill this gap for reference data, but also help to construct and operate a sustainable infrastructure for human genomics in Flanders/Belgium.  
 

This project is a collaboration between KU Leuven, Ghent University, University of Antwerp, IMEC, VITO and VIB. The VIB-ELIXIR Belgium team will coordinate the establishment of the infrastructure: interact with sequencing sites to leverage data transfer, establish the distributed sequence data storage infrastructure, streamline the analysis procedures in collaboration with VSC.