As people age, their blood accumulates genetic changes. One type of change, called “CHIP”, strongly predicts whether a person will soon develop disease such as cancer or heart disease. If we could develop a method to detect CHIP in healthy people, it could revolutionise how these common diseases are managed. Unfortunately, current methods to identify CHIP are slow and expensive, and not ready for application to public health.
We believe we have developed a method to address this, and enable the detection of CHIP using standard techniques that are already used in clinical laboratories. We will use the UK Biobank data to refine and test our methods, and establish whether our measure of CHIP predicts future health in the UK Biobank. This project will take around two years, and if successful has the potential to establish a new approach to identify people at high risk of cancer and heart disease in the population, for targeted surveillance and disease management.