A consortium of European biomedical research institutes and pharmaceutical companies will join with genotyping and bioinformatics facilities in an ambitious project to use tissue samples from patients enrolled in large clinical trials to begin to work towards a new classification of disease based on genomic and proteomic information [see report in Nature magazine: Butler, D. (2001) Nature 414, 139]. Partners in the venture include the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine in Oxford, the Centre for Genotyping in Paris, the European Bioinformatics Insitute near Cambridge, and pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and Roche. The aim of the project, which is being described as "genomic epidemiology", is to amass large amounts of data on the genetic, protein expression and metabolite profiles of tissue samples from thousands of patients who have been classified by standard clinical criteria as suffering from diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, metabolic disease, or various types of cardiovascular disease. The data will be analysed to search in a systematic way for the underlying molecular and genetic features of these diseases, and to see if patterns in these features differentiate different subtypes of disease that may, for example, progress differently or benefit from different treatment regimes. The databases generated by the project will be publicly available.