Genome Finland : From Rare Diseases to Data Economy

Abstract

Genome Finland tells a story of genomic medicine in Finland from the study of rare Finnish diseases in the 1960s and 1970s to the implementation of personalized medicine in the 2020s. The main focus is on the 21st century – the period after the Human Genome Project – and on the establishment of new infrastructures to support genomic medicine, such as biobanks. The book opens up the reasoning and discussions as well as the settings and events through which Finnish medical genetics reached the top level of international biomedicine in the late 1990s, biobanks and biobank research evolved during the 2000s and 2010s, and large transnational public-private partnership projects utilising massive amounts of genome and patient data started to dominate also Finnish research into the 2020s. In particular, Genome Finland examines and exposes the connections between biomedical science, ‘knowledge-based’ economy and business, and innovation policy in Finland during the past decades.