(Yicai) April 7 -- The United States' decision to revoke access to key biomedical databases by six “countries of concern,” including China, will affect important international collaboration projects in cutting-edge areas, according to experts in genetics and cancer research.

The US National Institutes of Health prohibited access to its Controlled-Access Data Repositories and associated data by institutions from China, Russia, Iran, and three other countries on April 4. The repositories include key data platforms, such as the database of genotypes and phenotypes and the cloud-based genetic data analysis platform AnVIL.

The NIH is the world’s largest biomedical research institution, and its platform data coverage is extremely comprehensive, a life sciences practitioner told Yicai.

“It will be more difficult for many medical research projects in China to access global core databases, which will have a certain negative impact on the development of science,” the person said.

In February last year, the US Department of Justice issued a final ruling to implement Executive Order 14117 on preventing “countries of concern” from accessing sensitive personal data and US government-related data and prohibiting or restricting US persons from engaging in transactions that involve US government-related data or bulk sensitive personal data.

Chinese clinicians had foreseen the possibility of being denied access to the biomedical databases, leading some oncologists to begin calling for China to set up its own databases as early as three to five years ago, the person said, adding that the effort faces challenges, such as funding and management.

“A lot of data in China is still scattered,” the expert noted. “Some hospitals have their own small biological databases, but there is no shared mechanism, as China has not yet established a large platform for tumor biological sample data.”

The NIH ban will impact Chinese projects in areas such as human genetics that were planning to use its database, a neuroscience researcher at a US university told Yicai. But the overall impact will be limited, as not all medical researchers need to use this data, the person added.

Editor: Futura Costaglione