Milestone for UK Biobank
pharmafile | July 8, 2010 | News story | Research and Development | DNA, MRC, UK Biobank, Wellcome
Medical research initiative the UK Biobank has collected DNA samples from its 500,000th volunteer, marking a major milestone in its quest to understand how genes, lifestyle and environment affect risks of developing disease.
The Biobank was launched in 2006 with the aim of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses, including cancer, heart diseases, diabetes, arthritis and forms of dementia.
Speaking to the BBC, chief scientific officer Dr Tim Sprosen said: “The real point of the Biobank is that we know a tremendous amount about people’s health when they develop a particular disease but arguably we know very little about what their diet was, what things were in their blood, etc, before they develop a disease.
“By putting together a vast amount of data together now on people’s health, with the samples, we will get reliable answers to the kind of questions they want to know. In ten or 20 years time, we will be able to analyse things in the samples that researchers haven’t even thought about yet.”
The project has been collecting blood and saliva samples from healthy volunteers aged 40-69 from across the country.
They attend an assessment centre where they answered questions on their health, lifestyle, diet, memory, work and family history, and have measures taken of their blood pressure, pulse rate, height, weight, body fat, vision, fitness grip strength, bone density and lung function. Samples of blood, saliva and urine are given for long-term storage and analysis.
The Biobank costs about £65 million and is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Department of Health, the Scottish Executive and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.
It also has the backing of many of the UK’s major medical research charities, including the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK.
Ben Adams
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