Completed Public Health & Healthcare

UK Biobank

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation UK Biobank Limited Source-published name: UK Biobank LTD
Other organisations recorded by Europe PMC University of Edinburgh · University of Oxford These are researcher affiliations; the award is counted once under the primary recipient above.
Funding £31.7M
Period Jul 2017 — Jul 2022

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The UK Biobank will scan the hearts, brains, and bodies of 100,000 volunteers, adding detailed medical images to its existing store of genetic and health data from half a million people. This matters because most medical research relies on small, short-term studies. The Biobank is a permanent, open-access resource that tracks a huge population over decades. Without it, researchers cannot easily link genetic variants, blood biomarkers, or lifestyle factors to the onset of specific diseases—such as cancer, heart disease, or dementia—in a way that is statistically powerful and reproducible. If this work succeeds, it will transform the infrastructure of medical discovery. Instead of each research group starting from scratch, any scientist anywhere can request data from the Biobank to test a hypothesis. This could accelerate the development of diagnostic tests, identify new drug targets, and improve risk prediction tools used by GPs. The project also plans to link to primary care records and streamline data access, making the entire system faster and more useful. This is primarily an infrastructure and resource-building project, not a single experiment. Its impact will be felt over decades, as thousands of studies draw on the data it provides.

View original technical description
As summarised in the extracted text below from our full application (page 5 "Proposed work") in Section 10 of this application form (and described in more detail on pages 5-16 of Section 10). During the next 5 years, it is intended to: - Extend cohort-wide linkage to primary care health records, while maintaining and updating health outcome data from existing linkages to death, cancer and hospital records (and explore the added value of linkages to additional healthcare datasets); - Further develop and implement large-scale identification and characterization of many different types of health outcome; - Streamline the research access systems, and improve methods for processing, presenting and providing linked healthcare data to researchers; - Maintain the sample resource, and make increasing amounts of different types of genotype and biomarker data available; - Conduct imaging assessments in 100,000 participants, and develop and implement further enhancements (such as cardiac monitoring and further sample collection and assays). Efforts will continue to be made to ensure that researchers from around the world are suitably well informed about the resource so that the effective use of it increases substantially, leading to novel findings that have a major impact on human health.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Cathie Sudlow (EPMC Awardee)Naomi Allen (EPMC Awardee)Rory Collins (EPMC Awardee)Tim Peakman (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

UK Biobank (core renewal)
UK Biobank pilot imaging enhancement
UK Biobank Imaging Enhancement Main phase
UK Biobank: Past Progress and future plans for 2010-2015 renewal application.
Mitochondrial biogenesis and disease

Original classification

Wellcome Major Award - Full

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