UK Biobank: An Open Access Resource for Identifying the Causes of a Wide Range of Complex Diseases of Middle and Old Age

Citation: Sudlow C, Gallacher J, Allen N, Beral V, Burton P, et al. (2015) UK Biobank: An Open Access Resource for Identifying the Causes of a Wide Range of Complex Diseases of Middle and Old Age. PLoS Med 12(3): e1001779. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001779

Published: March 31, 2015

Copyright: © 2015 Sudlow et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Funding: UK Biobank has received funding from the UK Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Department of Health, British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK, Northwest Regional Development Agency, Scottish Government, and Welsh Assembly Government. As described in the manuscript, the MRC and Wellcome Trust played a key role in the decision to establish UK Biobank, a large, population-based, prospective, open access resource that would allow detailed investigations of the genetic and environmental determinants of the diseases of middle and old age. The MRC, Wellcome Trust, Department of Health, and Scottish Chief Scientist Office each have a representative on the UK Biobank Board. The MRC and Wellcome Trust fund the independent Ethics and Governance Council.

Competing interests: All authors are current or past members of UK Biobank’s executive management team or steering committee, or of one of UK Biobank’s working groups. PM is a part-time employee and holder of stock and options in GlaxoSmithKline and has received attendance fees and contributed to panels convened by the Medical Research Council, a public funder of UK Biobank. JD has received research funding from The Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation, UK Medical Research Council, BUPA Foundation, Denka, diaDexus, European Research Council, European Union, Evelyn Trust, Fogarty International Centre, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, National Health Service Blood and Transplant, National Institute for Health Research, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, UK Biobank. RC is the CEO and PI of UK Biobank, which is a charity set up by the MRC and Wellcome Trust to establish this prospective cohort as a resource for researchers from around the world. RC is a member of the Editorial Board of PLOS Medicine. All other authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Provenance: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed

Summary Points

UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40–69 years when recruited in 2006–2010.
The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.
Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.
UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public.

The challenge of understanding the determinants of common life-threatening and disabling conditions is substantial. These conditions are typically caused by a combination of lifestyle, environmental, and genomic factors, with individually modest effects and complex interactions, the detection and quantification of which require studies with large numbers of disease cases. While retrospective case-control studies of particular diseases [1] or existing prospective studies of particular risk factors can help to address this challenge [2,3], a complementary approach is to establish large prospective cohorts designed to study a much wider range of known and novel risk factors for a wide range of diseases [4]. Prospective studies can assess exposures before the onset and treatment of disease, diseases that are not readily investigated by retrospective studies, and both the adverse and beneficial effects of a specific exposure on the lifetime risks of different diseases.

UK (United Kingdom) Biobank is a very large, population-based prospective study, established to allow detailed investigations of the genetic and nongenetic determinants of the diseases of middle and old age [5,6]. It aims to combine extensive and precise assessment of exposures with comprehensive follow-up and characterisation of many different health-related outcomes, as well as to promote innovative science by maximising access to the resource. Recruitment of 500,000 participants and the collection of an unprecedented wealth of baseline data and samples were completed in 2010. Activity is now focused on further phenotyping of participants and their health outcomes and on providing access to researchers from around the world.