select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
Fiona fox's blog
UK Biobank has reached its target of scanning 100,000 volunteers as part of a landmark project to provide for scientific research the most detailed look inside the human body. This is now the world’s largest whole-body imaging project – scanning the brains, hearts, abdomens, blood vessels, bones and joints of volunteers to give researchers a new layer of detail to explore what happens in people’s bodies as they age and how and why we become ill as we age.
One billion images have now been generated from these scans, and tens of thousands of researchers around the world have been using these (as it has been released in batches since the project began) along with UK Biobank’s information on lifestyle, medical history, genetics and blood proteins from the same volunteers, to do research into ill health.
Findings from the 1,300 peer-reviewed papers using this data so far include better brain scanning for patients with dementia symptoms in NHS memory clinics, faster analysis of heart scans in over 90 countries, and developments in understanding biological age of organs versus chronological age.
Soon, approved researchers will have access to the full set of imaging data from all 100,000 volunteers to help develop new diagnostics, preventative medicines and treatments.
Journalists came to this press briefing to ask your questions and to hear from those running the project discuss:
– What’s so special about this data and why are researchers so excited by it?
– How is this project helping the UK and the NHS right now?
– What scientific findings have the imaging data already led to?
– Why is the focus now switching to repeating scans of people, rather than scanning more people?
– Who can use this data and what can they use it for?
Speakers included:
Prof Sir Rory Collins, Principal Investigator and Chief Executive, UK Biobank
Prof Naomi Allen, Chief Scientist, UK Biobank
Prof Paul Matthews, Chair of the UK Biobank Imaging Working Group; and Edmond and Lily Safra Professor of Translational Neuroscience and Therapeutics, Imperial College London; and Director, The Rosalind Franklin Institute
Prof Louise Thomas, Professor of Metabolic Imaging, University of Westminster
Prof Rachel McKendry, Executive Director, Discovery, Wellcome