ESHG 2026 Conference Report
A report from ESHG 2026 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where I presented a GWAS on social isolation using ToMMo data and reflected on promoting Japanese biobanks internationally.
I attended ESHG 2026, the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Genetics, held in Gothenburg, Sweden.
It was about a 15-hour train ride from Groningen. The scenery from the train window gradually shifted from the wetlands of the Netherlands to the characteristically Scandinavian terrain with exposed bedrock. Gothenburg is Sweden's second-largest city, a commercial hub that developed around its port. The streetscapes along the canals were beautiful, lined with many small and charming boutique shops. At the same time, the streets were relatively uncrowded, giving off that distinctly Nordic sense of spaciousness.
ESHG 2026 was held at a venue approximately a 30-minute walk from Gothenburg Central Station, close to the major tourist attractions. On the morning of the first day, there was a long queue for badge collection stretching outside the venue, which gave me a real sense of the scale of the conference.
ESHG is the largest academic meeting on human genetics in Europe, and many researchers from Japan participate every year. This was my first time attending and also my first time presenting.
The enormous hall featured approximately 50 corporate exhibition booths, and although the posters were rotated across three separate sessions, each session appeared to display around 100 to 200 posters. There were also five lecture halls, each with a capacity of about 1,000 people, where cutting-edge talks were always available, including presentations of research that had already attracted attention at the preprint stage.
Overall, the composition of presentation topics gave me an impression broadly similar to that of the Japan Society of Human Genetics. On the other hand, I was struck by the presence of presentations on methodological foundations of human genetics research, such as those on software and algorithm development for genomic analysis. In population genetics, which is close to my own field, there were relatively few presentations of GWAS results from large-scale international consortia per se; instead, post-GWAS analyses using biobank and publicly available data were much more common.
I gave a poster presentation titled "Genome-wide association study of social isolation in 63,497 Japanese adults from the general population," reporting on a GWAS of social isolation using data from the Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization.
This research began three years ago as a collaboration with the Department of Social Epidemiology at Kyoto University. It was an ambitious research plan aimed at quantitatively evaluating how people maintain connections with society and family, and exploring the genetic background underlying these connections.
In this study, we identified two genome-wide significant loci. We were able to demonstrate that incorporating a genetic perspective is also valuable for phenotypes related to human social behavior, and we hope this will lead to further collaboration between social epidemiology and human genetics in the future.
The core time for poster presentations was one hour, from 12:00 to 13:00. The enormous venue was flooded with attendees holding cups of coffee, and many were sitting on the floor along the walls eating lunch—the hall was enveloped in an extraordinary level of energy and excitement. Some people became interested in my poster while walking through the venue by chance, while other researchers had found my work in advance and came specifically to hear about it.
What made this possible was the conference's dedicated app. This app was extremely user-friendly—you could search for presentations by theme or affiliation, and even set reminders for presentations of interest. It was a system that truly anticipated every need. It allowed me to easily engage with those who were interested in my research, and despite the enormous scale of the conference, a framework was in place for efficiently connecting with other researchers.
From here, I would like to record some slightly technical and personal reflections that emerged from my conversations with other researchers, as a memo for my own future reference.
First, the international visibility of the Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization is not yet sufficiently high. Despite being one of East Asia's leading biobanks, with data from approximately 150,000 general population participants and whole-genome sequencing data for approximately 100,000 individuals, only one out of the roughly 20 researchers I spoke with was aware of its existence.
On the other hand, when I explained the Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, everyone showed great interest, and quite a few asked specific questions about data sharing procedures. It is not that the data is unused—I realized that the issue is simply that its existence and how to access it are not sufficiently well known.
At this ESHG, I believe I was probably the only one presenting work using Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization data. This was a sobering reminder that we need to be more proactive in publicizing our research outputs and data infrastructure on the international stage.
Second, I found two presentations that utilized GWAS summary statistics from the Japan Environment and Children's Study (JECS), which had been released as a preprint the previous year. Since JECS is a cohort study targeting pregnant women and their families, the absolute number of related presentations is smaller compared to biobanks targeting the general adult population. However, through its large research scale and the impact of making data publicly available, it had established a solid presence even at an international conference.
The Three-Generation Cohort Study of the Tohoku Medical Megabank Project is also a valuable research infrastructure that combines detailed maternal and child information with genomic data. However, because GWAS summary statistics have not been widely released until now, there have been very few opportunities for other researchers to utilize them in this manner.
Through these experiences, I was led to reflect that unless we go beyond simply publishing research results as papers—proactively disseminating findings through conferences and carefully making our outputs available in formats that other researchers can readily use—our work may not lead to subsequent research, and we may not fully contribute to the advancement of science as a whole.
Overall, attending ESHG helped me understand, at least in part, why cross-utilization of biobanks is so active in Europe. I experienced firsthand the dynamism by which information is continuously shared at venues like ESHG, and collaborative research emerges across languages and national borders.
For the average European researcher, conducting research using East Asian biobanks involves high barriers in terms of both limited information and technical and procedural hurdles. Therefore, it may be necessary to actively disseminate information at venues like ESHG and position Japanese biobanks within the biobank research ecosystem that has been established in Europe.
Most importantly, many of the researchers I exchanged ideas with this time were enthusiastic about incorporating data from Japanese populations into their analyses. In order to promote the international utilization of Japanese biobank research, I intend to continue attending ESHG in the future, maintaining efforts in information dissemination and research exchange.
