Asia Cohort Consortium (ACC) is an international collaborative study aimed to understand how genetic and environmental factors are associated with onsets of diseases using cohorts from Asian countries with a total of one million healthy population.
Through the utilization of the cohort data with a long follow-up period, we aim to conduct analyses on diseases such as cancer. We hope to provide reliable scientific evidence to the emerging health issues and causes in Asia.

Background

Over the past few decades, the economy, population demographics, as well as the lifestyles have dramatically changed, resulting in the change in the health status of the people. Particularly, lifestyle-related diseases including cancer have been continuing to increase, leading to newly emerging problems in the medical system and public health. Fortunately, Asia has valuable expertise and research resources to solve these problems. ACC utilizes its strengths in order to reduce the burden of non-communicable diseases in Asia.
ACC is an international gathering of researchers exploring the link between genetic and environmental factors and diseases, through utilizing data from a newly established cohort (consisting of one million healthy subjects living in Asian countries) as well as pre-existing cohorts. It was established in 2004 in Seoul, Korea by the callings from Dr. John Potter from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) and Dr. Daehee Kang from Seoul National University.
There are two missions of ACC. One is to serve as a platform for cross-collaborative projects and combined analysis in Asia; another is to act as an incubator for new cohorts. Currently, the ACC coordination center, located at the National Cancer Center Japan, is doing the administrative work necessary to facilitate the various research activities conducted in order to fulfil the missions of the ACC.

Global collaboration

ACC holds regular meetings for researchers from countries such as Bangladesh, China, India, Iran, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States to report the progress of their ongoing cohort researches, to discuss common research planning strategies, as well as to promote collaborative projects. Until now, 33 meetings have been held in various ACC member countries.

Establishment of new cohorts

ACC has launched new cohorts in Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore through active recruitment of the participants. To be able to pool the data in the later stage of the cohorts, these countries are using a common data collection method. Other Asian countries also are hoping to launch new cohort projects.

New dimension of ACC

There are currently 43 cohorts participating in ACC. More than 50 research projects have been carried out so far, and about 30 projects are ongoing now. These projects, led by ACC members who are also the principal investigators of the existing cohort studies, include data from 25 cohort studies in Bangladesh, China, Korea, India, Iran, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. The data from these projects, including over one million study participants, will provide valuable information on cancer and other major disease patterns across Asia, as well making possible to conduct a variety of integrated analysis within ACC.

Collaboration with ACC

To achieve our mission, ACC welcomes collaboration with researchers who aim to achieve the same goal with us. Please contact us if you are interested in launching new cohorts in Asia and other regions. Additionally, if you are interested in participating in cross-sectional studies using pre-existing cohort data, or would like to propose a new project, please contact the Coordinating Center for further details. We hope to support the community of researchers who want to promote disease prevention and medical research through collaborative research.

For the information such as participating cohorts, published work, please refer to the ACC home page.
http://www.asiacohort.org/