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Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) Policy
Background
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NIH Mission
The mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to uncover new knowledge that will lead to better health for everyone. The sharing of ideas, data, and research findings is encouraged by NIH as a primary mechanism for accomplishing this important public mission.
Data Sharing
Rapid advances in understanding the patterns of human genetic variation and maturing high-throughput, cost-effective methods for genotyping are providing powerful research tools for identifying genetic variants that contribute to health and disease. Consistent with the NIH mission to improve public health through research and the longstanding NIH policy to make available to the public the results of the research activities that it funds, the NIH has concluded that the full value of GWAS can be realized only if the genotype and phenotype datasets derived from GWAS are made available as rapidly as possible to a wide range of scientific investigators. The NIH recognizes that GWAS data release practices must be consistent with the informed consent provided by individual participants.
The NIH considers broad data access to be particularly important for GWAS because of the significant resources involved (which necessarily limits the number of projects that can be supported for any disease), the serious analytical challenges involved in such large datasets, and the powerful opportunities that will be provided by the ability to make comparisons across multiple studies.
Related Resources
For additional information on Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) please access the following NIH Website:
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