The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 278 No 7450 p518
5 May 2007

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UK Biobank begins — volunteers seen at assessment centres in Manchester and Oxford

The UK Biobank project, which aims to collect genetic and lifestyle information from 500,000 volunteers for use in research, has kicked off in England. The project’s assessment centre in Manchester will soon be assessing 110 volunteers a day, and a site in Oxford began receiving volunteers this week.

Rory Collins, principal investigator and chief executive of UK Biobank, spoke last month at “Healthcare innovations: the next frontier”, a conference organised by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, the Medical Research Council and the NHS National Institute for Health Research. He said: “What we are doing is getting consent from participants for access to their past and future medical and other health-related records so we can enhance our understanding of these individuals at baseline, and then find out what conditions they develop in the future.”

Professor Collins said that this would help researchers to look at why a person does or does not develop a particular disease. He explained that in the future there would be calls for research proposals to use the Biobank resource.