The genomics revolution in biology will underlie the practice of medicine in the 21st Century. The MedBio Project is an exemplar of this concept as the project seeks to collect biospecimens from humans that are being used to generate information on human genetics through sequencing of the human genome, and the microbiome through sequencing and establishing profiles of microbial composition that can be integrated with electronic health records and other clinical data. By crowdsourcing across UPMC and University of Pittsburgh investigators, MedBio brings together a wide variety of patient registries and clinical investigations and carefully characterized patient phenotypes that can be associated with these biospecimens and their genomic and microbiome information. Participants in MedBio represent a wide variety of disease phenotypes including: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), pulmonary hypertension, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), cancer, renal disease and autoimmune disorders.

        As part of the MedBio v2.2 collection, over 5,000 specimens (mostly stool or oral) from more than 3,000 participants have been sequenced for microbial taxonomic composition using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Approximately 1,480 human genomes have been sequenced with over 760 individuals having both a human genome and microbiome sequence.