The Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program aims to improve understanding of the diseases through the integration of Whole-Genome Sequencing (WGS) and other omics data from pre-existing parent studies having large samples of human subjects. The two studies used in this work, Genetic Epidemiology of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGene) and Evaluation of COPD Longitudinally to Identify Predictive Surrogate Endpoints (ECLIPSE), are both part of TOPMed. As of February 2020, TOPMed has gathered data from ~155k participants with rich phenotypic data. TOPMed prioritizes to increase ancestral and ethnic diversity, so ~60% of the sequenced participants are of non-European ancestry (31% African, 16% Hispanic, 9% Asian, and 4% Others).
