The International Hundred Thousand Plus Cohort Consortium: integrating large-scale cohorts to address global scientific challenges
Read all about the International Hundred Thousand Plus Cohort Consortium (IHCC) in an article, written by leaders of the IHCC, recently published in The Lancet.
Large cohort studies involving hundreds of thousands of participants have been established or launched in several regions worldwide. Cohorts provide great value for studying diverse populations and key demographic subgroups, rare genotypes and exposures, and gene-environment interactions. Each cohort is constrained, however, by its size, ancestral origins, and geographical boundaries, which limit the subgroups, exposures, outcomes, and interactions it can examine. Linking data across large cohorts provides a vast digital resource of diverse data to address questions that none of these cohorts can answer alone, enhancing the value of each cohort and leveraging the enormous investments made in them to date.
Leaders of large-scale cohorts, with support from the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, and in collaboration with the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and the Global Genomic Medicine Collaborative (G2MC), have come together to form the International Hundred Thousand Plus Cohort Consortium (IHCC).
