Health-care provider Kaiser Permanente based in Oakland, California, is building a biobank that could rival the world's largest in size and scope. The organization has received a grant of US$8.6 million from the philanthropic Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, to collect DNA specimens from 200,000 people enrolled in Kaiser's medical-care plan.

Kaiser will link the DNA to participants' existing electronic medical records and to a planned database of environmental information, with the aim of reaching a total of 500,000 participants by 2012 — making it much larger than any other current biobank in the United States. The data will be available to researchers around the world for studying how genes and other factors influence disease risk and health.