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Biobank large-scale recruiting underway in Manchester

26 March 2007   |   By Dr Alison Stewart   |   News story
Following a successful pilot study, UK Biobank has begun to roll out its recruitment programme, beginning the greater Manchester area (see press release). Over the next year, tens of thousands of people aged 40-69 will receive a letter inviting them to enrol in Biobank and to attend an initial assessment session at which they will be asked about their current lifestyle and have some basic medical tests such as blood pressure, weight, lung function and bone density. They will also be asked to give samples of blood and urine, and to give permission for their medical records to be accessed by Biobank over the next 20-30 years. Although recruitment is by invitation only, such is the scale of the project that Biobank’s organisers say “most people aged 40-69 who live within a five to ten mile radius of the Manchester assessment centre can expect to receive an invitation to join in the months ahead”. Recruitment of Biobank’s full cohort of 500,000 people is expected to take about 4 years, and will begin at other assessment centres across the country over the next few months.
Keywords: Disease Susceptibility (Environmental), Disease Susceptibility (Genetic), Genetic Databases
Photo credit: U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs