Our Future Health

Our Future Health

You may have seen or heard the announcement of a new research project called ‘Our Future Health’, which is starting to invite people to participate – much like we did about 15 years ago in UK Biobank. Our Future Health is funded by the Government, charities and the pharmaceutical industry and aims to assess the detection, prevention and treatment of disease in the NHS.

We are supportive of this new project, which is complementary to UK Biobank. It will build on the work of UK Biobank in successfully demonstrating how to establish large long-term population studies in the UK and allowing researchers around the world to use de-identified information about participants to make important discoveries about ways to prevent and treat disease. UK Biobank’s success is of course down to you, the half a million participants who generously agreed to make information about yourselves available for health-related research.

Our Future Health does not know that you are already a participant in UK Biobank, so you may receive a letter from the Our Future Health team asking you to join the project. In order that the evidence generated in UK Biobank can be tested independently in Our Future Health, it would be scientifically better for people not to take part in both studies (although you may participate in both if you wish).

If you have any questions about how Our Future Health relates to your participation in UK Biobank, please contact UK Biobank’s Participant Contact Centre on 0800 0 276 276.