Background
The major challenges facing most developed nations are those related to the rising incidence of common, complex diseases in all age groups, but particularly the young and the aging, and the increasing complexity of their diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Chronic diseases such asthma, diabetes, obesity, CVD, osteoporosis and schizophrenia are associated with significant long-term morbidity and mortality, and are major public health problems both in Australia and worldwide. They are also rising in incidence in many societies and are associated with substantial economic costs worldwide. We are now also seeing increases in costly disorders associated with lifestyle risk factors such as obesity (25% of Australian teenagers now obese, up from 10% 15 years ago). Identification of specific environmental and genetic factors affecting susceptibility to such diseases is likely to allow fundamental insights into disease biology, and will in turn help to better define new therapies and preventive strategies.
Achieving a greater understanding of genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors in health and disease is perhaps the greatest challenge for modern biomedical science. Genes, environmental factors and our lifestyle act both independently and in combination to influence our vulnerability to disease. Those countries with the highest chance of successfully making effective use of genomic information in basic science, clinical, and public health applications are those with total population and longitudinal data linked to family health records. Such resources already exist in Western Australia. These resources are internationally unique and if managed correctly could place Australia firmly at the forefront of the human genomics revolution worldwide.
WA has a large number of internationally unique population-based resources. As a result there exist significant opportunities to translate this State's strengths in clinical research, epidemiology and world-class population-based data sets into an internationally competitive research program in human genome epidemiology. This is also essential capacity building in order to enable the development of a sustainable human biotechnology industry in Australia.
The Western Australian Genetic Epidemiology Resource (WAGER), funded by an NHMRC Enabling Grant in 2004 and led by Prof Lyle Palmer, has developed enabling infrastructure to facilitate the integration of existing and future disease-specific clinical, epidemiological and genetic resources available in WA with biospecimen banks and with the core WA Data Linkage System.
The capacity to link core datasets to a large number of population-based case-control and longitudinal cohort studies with extensive exposure data and biospecimens means that we have the potential to investigate the changing roles of environmental and genetic factors (and their interactions) over the entire life span in subjects representative of the general Australian population. The way that WAGER has been constructed means that the data linkage and research functions of the project are clearly segregated and subject to separate rigorous ethical and regulatory oversight procedures. At the same time, great care is taken to ensure that the control of research information remains with the designated custodian of those data.
Note that the data custodianship of study data stored within WAGER remains with the original Custodians at all times. The Custodian's consent is required before access to any data hosted by WAGER will be granted to a third party.
