UK Biobank has won support from many of the country’s – and indeed the world’s – leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winners. Read some of their comments below.
Dr Mark Walport, Director, Wellcome Trust: "UK Biobank provides an important opportunity to advance our knowledge of the causes of health and disease. Studying large populations for long periods allows us to understand the links between the environment, health and disease. Such studies have been enormously valuable. For example, understanding the link between high blood pressure and stroke, or the increased risk of cot death for babies sleeping on their fronts, came from studies of populations. This knowledge has resulted in substantial health improvements. Now we can combine the power of large population studies with modern informatics and genetics. UK Biobank has the capacity to answer questions about health and disease that could benefit future generations."
Professor John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford and UK Biobank Board member: "All common diseases result from interaction of genes, their products and the environment. UK Biobank represents the best approach for studying these factors together. For example, there is a desperate shortage of biological material available from prospective cohorts that will be necessary for discovery or assessing the ability of biomarkers as predictors of cancer, diabetes or vascular disease. Two of the biggest insights into common disease aetiology, smoking and cholesterol, have already come from such studies. By leveraging this study with biological material, equally important insights can be anticipated. "It is no wonder that many other developed countries are now establishing their own Biobank projects, often modelled after the UK Biobank (e.g. Canada, Norway, Sweden, USA, Singapore)."
Professor Martin Bobrow FRS, Head of the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Cambridge: "UK Biobank will allow us to study, with a minimum of experimental “bias” error, which diseases occur more or less frequently in people with particular genetic or non-genetic features in common. Because it will not be focused only on bad effects, but on the total health experience of that group of people, UK Biobank should avoid exaggerating the ill effects of particular dietary, lifestyle or genetic factors, and give us a more balanced view of how these common variables influence our health for better or for worse."
Professor Sydney Brenner FRS, Nobel Prize winning biologist, The Salk Institute, San Diego, California: "By studying the relationship between genes, lifestyle and environmental factors, the UK Biobank will be the future of medical research."
Professor Richard Dawkins, Oxford Professor for Public Understanding of Science. “If I am invited to take part, I shall accept with pleasure. It will be a fantastic resource for research.”
Dr Ian Gibson MP: "Two years ago when UK Biobank was discussed by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, of which I was then chairman, I had some concerns about the likely value of this study. Since then, as the project has evolved, I've had more opportunities to discuss its aims, design and future plans. Now, I am very confident that it will succeed and be an extraordinarily valuable resource for public health in the UK. It has my full backing."
Alastair Kent, director of the Genetic Interest Group, an umbrella organization for 130 charities representing children, families, and individuals affected by genetic diseases:” I wholeheartedly support the initiative. The generosity of people taking part in the project will help dedicated researchers to understand the links between the environment, lifestyle and genetics in the common conditions of later life. Knowing the causes will surely help to lead to improved prevention, diagnosis and treatments that will benefit our families and society as a whole for generations to come.”
Sir John Sulston, Nobel Prize winner and former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which spearheaded the UK's contribution to the international Human Genome Project. “I strongly support this initiative, building as it does on the public resources of the British National Health Service and the Human Genome Project, for the good of all.”
Sir Walter Bodmer, leading geneticist and former head of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund: “One of the major challenges of post-genomic studies is to explore the wide range of human genetic diversity, especially as it relates to susceptibility to disease. UK Biobank will make a major contribution to this aim which will, and surely should be emulated in many other countries. It is a unique study, whose aim is to make it possible to relate the UK population’s overall health and illness patterns to genetic susceptibility factors, as well as lifestyle and environment. Its scale, covering 500,000 people or a 1 in 30 sample, will mean that all the common complex diseases will be well covered. It is entirely complementary to disease specific case-control studies, which should provide the background for the disease studies that will eventually be embedded in UK Biobank. The project will provide an opportunity for participation of researchers with a wide variety of interests in different diseases, from cancers through heart disease to Alzheimer’s.”
Professor Michael S. Brown, MD, Nobel Prize winner 1985, Regental Professor, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, Texas: "The seeds of disease are sown years in advance. A classic example is the heart attack that follows decades of elevated cholesterol. Knowledge of the antecedent factors will direct us to preventive measures. Unfortunately, we know only a few such predisposing factors. Most arise from an interaction between genes and environmental stresses. By obtaining a panorama of measurements years before a disease becomes manifest, projects like the UK Biobank can help us to predict and avoid disease. The logistical challenges are significant. Through careful planning invaluable information can be obtained. The time to begin is now."
Professor Thorkild Sørensen, Institute of Preventive Medicine, Copenhagen, Denmark and Chairman of UK Biobank’s International Review Panel: “It was a great honour to chair the panel for this exciting and very important project. Comprehensive and impressive plans, based on valuable pilot studies, were presented to the panel, who unanimously endorsed the protocol and put forward a number of suggestions that would enhance the long-term value of this unique project.”
Dr Silvia Franceschi, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France and member of the International Review Panel: “"In the past, I would have been tempted to consider the performance of a large cohort study in only one country a weakness but, though this may be true in very homogeneous countries (e.g., Nordic Countries), I believe that the UK population offers sufficient diversity to carry out comparisons over a very broad range of characteristics. Actually, provided the study is big enough, the strong control over study quality and management made possible by the location in one country only may actually turn into a great advantage and a guarantee for very long and productive life."
Dr Teri Manolio, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA: "UK Biobank is well-designed, scientifically sound, and likely the greatest scientific opportunity yet proposed for identifying etiologic factors related to major chronic diseases in an unbiased, reproducible, and generalizable way. It can provide a major contribution to the field of population-based cohort studies by making its meticulously-designed protocols and data collection methods widely available to other investigators starting similar studies."
Professor John Danesh, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, Head, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge: "Due to remarkable advances in the ability to measure genes, blood proteins, and important aspects of lifestyle, scientific reports regularly throw up possible new causes of medical conditions such as heart disease and cancer. Most of these suggestions, however, don't get properly tested, largely because available medical surveys have typically been too small or too limited to distinguish noisy false starts from the often subtle but important signals that herald scientific breakthroughs. The 500,000-person UK Biobank study will, by contrast, provide a resource that will enable the reliable assessment of the scientific community's brightest ideas (including current suggestions as well as unforeseen ideas that arise in future). "It is designed to be big and detailed enough to investigate the separate and combined influences of genetic and environmental factors on a broad range of common adult diseases. Like landmark surveys of previous generations such as the 40,000-person British doctors' study or the 5,000-person American Framingham study (which helped to identify cigarette smoking and blood pressure, respectively, as important disease-causing factors), the UK Biobank resource will become increasingly valuable in the years after its collection. Launching such surveys requires vision and a bit of patience, but it will be well worth the effort."
Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys FRS, Lasker Prize winner 2005, Department of Genetics, University of Leicester: "This is an important initiative that is now developing focus and which promises to provide an invaluable resource for investigating the causes of common disease that will last for decades into the future. Just what will be discovered is of course unpredictable, but experience from previous smaller-scale studies guarantees that findings of major importance to the health of the nation will emerge from UK Biobank."
Professor Stephen MacMahon, Director of the George Institute, University of Sydney, Australia: "The UK Biobank project is widely regarded as a ground-breaking study that will deliver a wealth of new information about both environmental and genetic determinants of common diseases. In the last century, it was the US-based Framingham Study that made fundamental discoveries such as cholesterol as a cause of heart disease and blood pressure as a cause of stroke. This century, the UK Biobank project is currently best placed to deliver similar evidence about the causes of diseases as diverse as Alzheimer's and prostate cancer."
Professor Tom Meade FRS, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: "Measuring personal characteristics like smoking along with genetic indicators can already identify people at especially high risk of disease. Biobank will greatly add to this ability, and because it is so large it will help with some important but less common conditions, as well as common ones. The UK is the ideal setting for the project because of the advantages for research provided by the NHS, which are the envy of many other countries."
Sir Richard Peto FRS, Professor of Medical Statistics & Epidemiology, University of Oxford: “UK Biobank is ten times bigger than other such studies, so it will be ten times better than other such studies at finding out why some people die before they are old. This study is like an epidemiological microscope, letting us investigate the avoidable causes of disease in greater detail than we could before. The genetic findings are obviously going to be interesting, but I suspect that the non-genetic findings will be even more interesting.
Dr Francis Collins, who led the US contribution to the international Human Genome Project: “The Human Genome Project was a landmark scientific achievement. However, it represents not an end to genetic exploration, but a beginning. To realize fully the immense promise of the Human Genome Project, we must now extend its scientific and technological approaches to understand the complex gene-gene and gene-environment interactions that determine human health and disease. The UK Biobank is well designed to take this next step - to make historic contributions to our understanding of the genetic and environmental factors in common disease. It is a well conceived and appropriately ambitious project that promises to supply insights that will revolutionize our approach to the prevention and treatment of human disease. I look forward with anticipation to its success and to the essential knowledge that it will contribute.”
Professor Nigel Mathers, Chair of Research, Royal College of General Practitioners: "UK Biobank is, in our view, one of the most important scientific endeavours of the 21st century. It will build on our existing knowledge of epidemiology and initiatives such as the Human Genome Project to create a database of information and samples. These can be used to help us in general practice to better diagnose and treat common diseases in the future. In addition Biobank will also help us to understand why the effectiveness of existing medicines varies amongst different people and allow researchers to ask new and important questions about the treatment of the common diseases such as coronary heart disease and high blood pressure. The Royal College of General Practitioners fully endorses Biobank and strongly supports the voluntary participation of our patients."