Case Study: Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland advances personalized medicine with Google for Education

Finnish research institute moves to Google Cloud to advance breakthroughs in personalized medicine

The Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) partnered with Google for Education to support FinnGen, a large-scale personalized medicine initiative combining genomic data with national health records from 500,000 Finnish citizens. As the dataset grew toward 1.5 petabytes, FIMM needed a secure, scalable way to process and store highly sensitive research data while meeting strict donor, institutional, and EU privacy requirements.

Google for Education helped FIMM build this platform on Google Cloud Platform using Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, DataProc, AppEngine, IAM, BigQuery, and CloudSQL. The solution split operations into a secure Data Factory and Data Library, with an isolated Sandbox for controlled researcher access; the Data Library has already migrated to Google Cloud, and the remaining processing is moving next. The result is improved security and usability, with all personal data kept within the EU and future storage potentially located in Finland.

Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland

Mari Kaunisto

Communications Director and Senior Researcher