CHINA WATCHUK Biobank and China’s Access to Foreign Genetic Information

UK Biobank, a long-term biobank study in the United Kingdom “investigating the respective contributions of genetic predisposition and environmental exposure (including nutrition, lifestyle, medications etc.) to the development of disease,” was recently urged to reconsider how it handles information transfers for medical research.

The Guardian reports: “Rising political and security tensions between Beijing and the west have prompted calls for a review of the transfer of genetic data to China from a biomedical database containing the DNA of half a million UK citizens. The UK Biobank said it had about 300 projects under which researchers in China were accessing “detailed genetic information” or other health data on volunteers. The anonymised data is shared under an open-access policy for use in studies into diseases from cancer to depression. There is no suggestion it has been misused or participants’ privacy compromised.”

Commenting on this issue, KCL’s Professor Jonathan Adams said there are “huge potential returns from having a good, positive, open relationship” with China but that current relationships relied “far too much on things like formal agreements, which we believe will protect things in a way they would if we were working with conventional partners”. “China is different. It’s transformed into a public research culture over a very short period, and the norms we expect are not necessarily universally adopted. My concern is that what gets published in English would be the bit above water that you can see.”

Pandora Report notes that this case and others like it echo last year’s warnings from the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center cautioning Americans to “Understand that all entities in the PRC, including commercial, research, and scientific, are required by law to share information with the PRC state security apparatus,” and that “Genomic technology used to design disease therapies tailored to an individual also can be used to identify genetic vulnerabilities in a population.”

Similar concerns were raised over BGI Group (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) and their NIFTY prenatal test. Kirsty Needham and Clare Baldwin explain that “U.S. government advisors warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said.”