Bionow

UK Biobank

UK Biobank is a long-term national project to build the world's largest information resource for medical researchers. It will follow the health of 500,000 volunteers aged 40-69 in the UK for up to 30 years.

Following consent, each participant has donated blood and urine sample and completed a confidential lifestyle questionnaire. Over the next 20 to 30 years UK Biobank will allow fully approved researchers to use these resources to study the progression of illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. From this they hope to develop new and better ways of preventing, diagnosing and treating such problems.

The UK Biobank is funded by the Department of Health, the Medical Research Council, the Scottish Executive, Wellcome Trust and the Northwest Development Agency. 

UK Biobank is centrally managed from its headquarters in Stockport and hosted by the University of Manchester. The headquarters has overall responsibility for delivering the project, including data management and quality assurance, computing, financial management, and formal custodianship of the data and biological samples. It also co-ordinates the activities of several regional collaborating centres which are responsible for participant recruitment, initial data collection and sample collection. 

For more details visit the UK Biobank website.