Global Biobank Engine: enabling genotype-phenotype browsing for biobank summary statistics

Large biobanks linking phenotype to genotype have led to an explosion of genetic association studies across a wide range of phenotypes. Sharing the knowledge generated by these resources with the scientific community remains a challenge due to patient privacy and the vast amount of data. Here we present Global Biobank Engine (GBE), a web-based tool that enables the exploration of the relationship between genotype and phenotype in large biobank cohorts, such as the UK Biobank. GBE supports browsing for results from genome-wide association studies, phenome-wide association studies, gene-based tests, and genetic correlation between phenotypes. We envision GBE as a platform that facilitates the dissemination of summary statistics from biobanks to the scientific and clinical communities. GBE currently hosts data from the UK Biobank and can be found freely available at biobankengine.stanford.edu.