UK Biobank newsletter homepage 2023/24
Dear participant,
I am delighted to share UK Biobank’s 2023/24 newsletter which celebrates a remarkable year.
With your support, we now have the world’s largest genome and protein databases. These treasure troves of data will lead to scientific discoveries on the prevention and treatment of disease for decades to come.
You have helped to make these amazing achievements happen:
- Over 30,000 researchers from universities, charities and companies around the world are approved to apply to use UK Biobank data for health research in the public interest.
- 15 million biological samples and 30 petabytes of data are available for researchers to use.
- 10,000 scientific papers have been published using UK Biobank data, with more published every day.
We have secured funding that will support UK Biobank’s growth in future years. We will receive £128 million from the UK’s national funding body for science (UK Research and Innovation) to build a facility in Manchester for our expanding team. In addition, philanthropists (Schmidt Futures and the Ken Griffin Foundation) and the UK government have donated $40 million to help us build our already unrivalled wealth of data.
We continue to honour our commitment to you to keep your data confidential and secure. Information that identifies you – for example, your name, address or NHS number – is never shared with researchers. The GP data that we are striving to collect is coded data about health conditions and medications, not written notes or letters, which we understand are private and personal to you.
Read more in the newsletter about the many scientific discoveries that your data is enabling, as well as the ways in which you can contribute further.
Thank you for your continued participation in UK Biobank. Without you, none of this would have been possible.
Very best wishes,
Rory Collins
Principal Investigator and Chief Executive, UK Biobank
(Sometimes letters like this arrive at difficult times in people's lives: if this is the case for you, please accept my sincere apologies.)
Rory Collins, Principal Investigator and Chief Executive, UK Biobank
Newsletter contents:
Your genetics, everybody's health
Your genetics around the world
Views on genetic data & ethics
Communications survey
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Stay in touch
Call our Participant Resource Centre on 0800 0 276 276 (9am-5pm, Monday to Friday)
Email us at ukbiobank@ukbiobank.ac.uk
(Please remember to include your Participant ID number in the email.)
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