For the past three years, Ravi Madduri, a senior computer scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory, and his team have been working on ways to speed up analysis of genetic data to accelerate the search for associations among genetic variants — and thus causality — in determining the risks for different diseases and identifying at-risk populations.
The data used in this pursuit is an ambitious project started by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) called the Million Veteran Program (MVP). A defining aspect of this project and the data collected is the diversity of those veterans contributing DNA samples: nearly one-third (29%) are of non-European ancestry.
The MVP is the VA’s largest effort to research improving health care for veterans. It is also among the largest programs studying genes and health in the world. And, since its 2011 launch, it has reached its namesake milestone, as one million veterans had contributed their DNA as of late 2023.