The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced grants totaling £30 million ($32.5 million) to UK Biobank to conduct a repeat set of imaging scans on 60,000 UK Biobank participants. 

Funded through three £10 million ($10.8 million) grants from CZI, the Medical Research Council (MRC), and Calico Life Sciences, the project aims to capture a repeated set of highly detailed, multi-organ images from a large cohort of participants, enabling researchers to assess changes in physiology over time. The effort will foster better understanding of the trajectory of major chronic diseases of mid-to-late life and help researchers explore the mechanisms through which diseases occur in individuals. 

The first phase of the UK Biobank imaging study began in 2014 and has already captured magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from the brain, heart, and abdomen, together with bone density and ultrasound scans of the carotid arteries, from more than 50,000 participants, with a goal of collecting these data on up to 100,000 participants over the next two years. The second phase of the project will involve performing repeat imaging on 60,000 of these participants, two to seven years after their initial scan.

“UK Biobank’s biomedical database is already the most comprehensive database in the world for scientific and health-related research. The collection of a repeat set of whole-body scans on such a large scale will enable many more fundamental discoveries, better understanding of early disease stages and their diagnosis, and support the development of new treatments for diseases of mid-to-later life,” said Paul Matthews, head of the Department of Brain Sciences and the UK Dementia Research Institute Centre at Imperial College London and chair of the UK Biobank Imaging Working Group. “We are grateful to the MRC, Calico, and CZI for their generous funding of this project and to the incredible UK Biobank participants without whose dedication and altruism we would not be able to conduct this ambitious study.” 

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Johnny Greig)