China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research

China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research Biobanks store masses of biomedical data such as clinical records, genome sequences and other long-term health metrics that research and drug development depend on. As a fledgling researcher in U.S., Zhang Li was struck by the efficiency of extracting human tissue in the morning and mining it for data the same afternoon. Such a streamlined process had been missing from his years of training as a bio data scientist in China. Inspired, he returned home to Beijing to join the Chinese Institute for Brain Research and launch a national database that will collect blood and DNA samples from 33,000 children to help identify patterns of brain disease and their risk factors. "Biomedical data is extremely valuable and is fundamental for us to find solutions to diseases and to delay aging," said Zhang, surrounded by robotic arms carefully organizing blood samples.