A study utilizing the research resources of BioBank Japan (BBJ) has been published in Nature Communications.

Kaoru ITO, Professor of The Graduate School of Medicine, Chiba University and Team Director of RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences, and their colleagues identified distinct genetic characteristics associated with different types of heart failure in Japanese and European patient populations through genetic analyses using data from BBJ and other international biobanks such as the UK Biobank.

In this study, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) were conducted using data from 213,828 individuals registered at BBJ, identifying five novel genetic loci related to heart failure. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrated that a polygenic risk score (PRS) quantifying genetic susceptibility to heart failure, along with biomarkers for mutations in the cardiomyopathy-causing gene TTN, can be used to predict the progression and prognosis of heart failure.

Original paper

Genome-wide analysis of heart failure yields insights into disease heterogeneity and enables prognostic prediction in the Japanese population
Nat Commun. 2025 Nov 3;16(1):9680.

Press release article (Japanese only)

https://www.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/imsut/jp/about/press/page_00359.html