|
The world's largest medical experiment, spearheaded by Health Minister Andy Burnham, will involve the collection of DNA samples from
500,000 Britons to discover the genetic basis of cancer, diabetes, dementia, and other killer diseases. Blood and urine samples will be collected from volunteers aged 40 to 69 over the next four years, with a local three-month pilot phase to be conducted in Manchester involving 3,800 participants. The UK Biobank would be implementing this project nationwide from the end of 2006 onwards.
Given the grandiosity of the project, some are concerned that it would take a long time to get verifiable results that could help in the immediate prevention of killer diseases, but scientists believe that in the long term, the project could improve prevention,
diagnosis and treatment of diseases and help to explain why certain
people react differently to medications.
A
total of 10 million samples are expected to be collected from
the half million volunteers for the whole project, from which the genetic data will be cross-referenced
against information about the volunteers' subsequent health, but only with their permission of course. Concerns as to whether the project's results will be accessible to medical institutions and pharmaceutical organizations all over the world were answered by the UK BioBank, and said that researchers
from around the world will be able to apply for access to
the resource but strict security systems will also be implemented to protect the privacy of the participants.
The
61 million-pound project will be funded by the British government, the
Wellcome Trust medical research charity and other sources.
|
|
