Three million people in England are being invited by letter to join the Our Future Health study, which will explore potential uses of genetic risk scores by analysing genomic data and NHS health records.
It is hoped that ultimately five million people will be enrolled in the study in what will become the UK's largest health research programme. The study is a public-private partnership with £80 million funding provided by the UK Government and £160 million from private life sciences companies. Invitations to participate will be sent in the autumn to households across four regions, including West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Greater London, though anybody resident in the UK over the age of 18 is able to sign up.
One goal of the study is to explore the potential uses of genetic risk scores in health screening programmes to facilitate earlier diagnosis of treatable conditions said chair Professor Sir John Bell, of the University of Oxford. He told the Guardian: '[The ambition] is to try and create a sandbox for testing and evaluating these early diagnostic or prevention strategies across a large population of people […] and we'll be able to use that population to help us evaluate these new tools, diagnose disease early, prevent disease more effectively, and intervene at an earlier stage.'
Participants will be asked to share their NHS health records alongside providing a blood test to take part in the Our Future Health study, and will be offered information about their blood pressure and cholesterol levels initially. Participants will also have the option to receive feedback about their risks of various diseases, initially focusing on heart disease and diabetes. The team behind the study said patient data would be de-identified before it was used and that consent would be sought from participants at different stages of the project. Participants would also be given the opportunity to consent to their data being used in other research projects.
Last year the NHS launched a pilot study to determine the effectiveness of polygenic risk scores in predicting cardiovascular disease among 1000 NHS patients in the North East of England (see BioNews 1089).
Having data from a large number of people was crucial to being able to identify interventions for people at high risk of a certain diseases said Professor Bell adding: 'We see this as a ten-to-20-year project. If we don't do this the NHS and the healthcare system is going to collapse under the weight of late-stage disease.'
Sources and References
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