FinnGen: an Example of a Large Public-Private Partnership Project

FinnGen aims to collect the genomic data of 500,000 citizens in Finland in order to deepen understanding about the origins of diseases and their treatment.

Professor Aarno Palotie, M.D., Ph.D. is the research director of the Human Genomics program at FIMM. He is also a faculty member at the Center for Human Genome Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has a long track record in human disease genetics. He has held professorships and group leader positions at the University of Helsinki, UCLA, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He has also been the director of the Finnish Genome Center and Laboratory of Molecular Genetics in the Helsinki University Hospital.

Palotie has chaired several large international research consortia as a member or chair, like the Sequencing Initiative Suomi, SISu (www.sisuproject.fi), SUPER project (www.superfinland.fi) and International Headache Genetics Consortium (IHGC, www.headachegenetics.org). Palotie is the Chief Scientific Officer of the FinnGen project (www.finngen.fi) is collecting the genome and health record data from 500 000 Finnish participants. The project is supported by Business Finland (The Finnish innovation fund) and several international pharma companies. He has published over 500 articles and book chapters.