The Korean Precision Nutrition Consortium (KPNC) and the National Project for Bio Big Data (BIKO) announced on the 17th that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) aimed at advancing precision medicine and establishing an ecosystem for personalized health management.

The National Project for Bio Big Data is building clinical and genomic data on a scale of 1 million people. The Korean Precision Nutrition Consortium plans to begin securing individual dietary, microbiome, and lifestyle data from next year and will explore ways to link and analyze these together with the project’s data.

Once integrated analysis becomes possible through data linkage across clinical, genomic, dietary, and microbiome domains, substantial research and service development is expected to expand systematically in areas such as individual disease risk assessment, chronic disease prevention strategy design, and development of personalized nutrition prescriptions. As medical and lifestyle-based data, previously scattered across ministries and institutions, become connected, the depth and reliability of precision health management models are also expected to increase.

Professor Lee Hae-jung of the Department of Food and Nutrition at Gachon University, who serves as general director of the Korean Precision Nutrition Consortium, said, “This agreement is part of the process of creating a foundation for the linked utilization of data generated from national projects, and it will play an important role in enhancing the effectiveness of precision nutrition research.”

Baek Rong-min, Head of the National Project for Bio Big Data (former Director of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital), stated, “Being able to use clinical, genomic, and lifestyle data in an integrated manner will greatly help in advancing personalized health management models,” adding, “We will continue to expand the precision medicine ecosystem in a stable manner through collaboration with various institutions.”

The two organizations plan to strengthen mutual cooperation by sequentially carrying out tasks such as establishing standards for data linkage, designing joint research, and promoting pilot studies.

Popular News