UK Biobank: An Open Access Resource for Identifying the Causes of a Wide Range of Complex Diseases of Middle and Old Age

Points• UK Biobank is a very large and detailed prospective study with over 500,000 participants aged 40-69 years when recruited in 2006-2010.• The study has collected and continues to collect extensive phenotypic and genotypic detail about its participants, including data from questionnaires, physical measures, sample assays, accelerometry, multimodal imaging, genome-wide genotyping and longitudinal follow-up for a wide range of health-related outcomes.• Wide consultation; input from scientific, management, legal, and ethical partners; and industrial-scale, centralised processes have been essential to the development of this resource.• UK Biobank is available for open access, without the need for collaboration, to any bona fide researcher who wishes to use it to conduct health-related research for the benefit of the public.The challenge of understanding the determinants of common life-threatening and disabling conditions is substantial.These conditions are typically caused by a combination of lifestyle, environmental, and genomic factors, with individually modest effects and complex interactions, the detection and quantification of which require studies with large numbers of disease cases.While retrospective case-control studies of particular diseases [1] or existing prospective studies of particular risk factors can help to address this challenge [2,3], a complementary approach is to establish large prospective cohorts designed to study a much wider range of known and novel risk factors for a wide range of diseases [4].Prospective studies can assess exposures before the onset and treatment of disease, diseases that are not readily investigated by