Big Is Informative, The experience of UK Biobank
Professor Sir Rory Collins
Principal Investigator and Chief Executive, UK Biobank, University of Oxford
Professor Collins is the British Heart Foundation Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, and the Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford. He is known for his transformative national and international contributions to cardiovascular disease and his visionary leadership of the UK Biobank.
The UK Biobank is the
largest widely available genetic epidemiological data set in the world. The
data set includes genotype, whole exome and whole genome sequencing data on 500,000
individuals, linked to a rich set of thousands of self-reported traits,
clinical care records, biomarker measures, and imaging data. Participants aged
40-69 years were recruited during 2006-2010 across 22 recruitment centers in
the UK and have been followed up multiple times since collecting a huge range
of information on their traits, biomarkers and diseases. By early-2021, more
than 20,000 researchers from almost 90 different countries had registered to
use the resource.