The BWH/Harvard Cohorts Biorespository has partners with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on a $4.9 million microbiome project funded by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC). The award is part of $18 million in capital infrastructure grants given by the MLSC to research institutions in Boston.

The project will involve building the Biobank for Microbiome Research in Massachusetts (BIOM-Mass) in collaboration with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

BIOM-Mass will be an integrated platform to dramatically increase capacity of the Massachusetts life sciences community to collect, use, and analyze microbiome-based biospecimens in human populations. It will:

• Create the world’s largest prospective collection of microbiome specimens from 25,000 individuals in the Nurses’ Health Study II and other long-running cohort studies
• Leverage cutting-edge laboratory automation to collect and store biospecimens for this and many future studies
• Deploy a novel analysis and bioinformatics data portal to support microbiome research and development

To date, over 8000 kits from the NHSII Micro-N collection have been received and processed with more arriving every day!

For more information:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/harvard-chan-school-awarded-4-9-million-to-create-microbiome-biobank/