The National Institutes of Health has made public more than 50 years worth of data from the Framingham Heart Study. The data from that study are the first to go live as part of the recently-launched, web-based SNP Health Association Resource (or SHARe) database, which is funded by NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

As per NIH's recently finalized policy on sharing genome-wide association study (GWAS) data, summary data from the Framingham study will be accessible to the general public, but information on individual patients is accessible only to qualified researchers who apply for such access through NIH. The launch of Framingham SHARe will provide the most robust test yet of the effectiveness of NIH's GWAS policy, which takes effect in January 2008 and establishes a 12-month period in which researchers submitting data have exclusive publishing rights over the information. That exclusivity window drew the concern of some scientists, who said that 12 months was a short time to write papers on such large datasets.

Framingham SHARe data are accessible through the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes, or dbGaP, an online repository for data from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) that is administered by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The Framingham dataset includes information gathered from more than 9,300 participants spanning three generations, including over 900 families, who had their DNA tested for 550,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs). Clinical information for each patient, such as weight and the results of laboratory tests, are also included in the dataset, while individual identifiers such as social security numbers and names are stripped from the records.

While dbGaP includes several smaller GWAS datasets, Framingham SHARe is the largest with more than 14,000 participants, and other NIH-funded population-scale genetic studies are expected to appear on dbGaP soon.

The Framingham study, which started with 5,209 adult residents of Framingham, Massachusetts in 1948, is on-going, and data from the study will be continually made available through the SHARe database.