Completed Heart, Stroke & Blood Digestion, Kidneys & Other Organs

China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) of 0.5 million adults.

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Oxford
Funding £1.6M
Period Sept 2014 — Aug 2016

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Half a million Chinese adults are providing blood samples, health data, and decades of medical follow-up to uncover the genetic and environmental roots of chronic disease. This matters because most large biobanks have focused on Western populations, leaving major gaps in understanding how diseases develop in people with different genetics, diets, and lifestyles. China’s rapid epidemiological transition—from infectious to chronic diseases—makes it a uniquely informative setting. The study has already recorded 1.2 million hospitalised events, including 30,000 strokes, the country’s commonest disease. If successful, the research will produce reliable evidence on how factors like smoking, alcohol, blood pressure, and obesity interact with DNA to cause specific illnesses. Because many biological pathways are shared across populations, findings from CKB will likely improve disease prediction and prevention strategies worldwide. The project also supports genome-wide association studies and multi-omic biomarker analyses of stroke, using scan-confirmed diagnoses for precision. This is primarily fundamental science—understanding disease mechanisms in a large, diverse population. Past biobank discoveries have led to new drug targets and risk calculators; CKB’s scale and non-Western focus could yield similarly unexpected breakthroughs for conditions that quietly drive global mortality.

View original technical description
CKB is one of the worlds largest blood-based prospective studies of the environmental and genetic determinants of chronic disease. During 2004-8, 510,000 adults from 10 localities across China were enrolled, with extensive data collection by questionnaire and physical measurement. Biological samples were stored for future research, and separately funded DNA extraction is underway. Funding is requested over the next 5 years to support: continued follow-up of cause-specific morbidity and mortality and electronic linkage to hospital records through nationwide health insurance systems; detailed event adjudication for diseases of major interest; management, analysis and curation of multidimensional data; resurvey of 25,000 participants. Support is also sought for well-powered nested case-control studies of scan-confirmed stroke, which is the commonest disease in China, using genome-wide association analysis of DNA and NMR-based multi-omic analyses of plasma biomarkers. By 1.1.2013, details of 1.2 million fatal and non-fatal hospitalised events (including 30,000 strokes) were encoded, which will yield reliable information about the effects of many different blood and non-blood-related (e.g. smoking, alcohol, adiposity, blood pressure, reproductive patterns) factors on many different diseases in this population. Much of what is discovered in CKB will be of general relevance for better understanding of disease aetiology in other populations.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Zhengming Chen (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Strategic Award - Science

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.