#EBW24 Live: Sir Rory Collins, UK Biobank delivers keynote lecture I – ‘Biobanking for Precision and Genomics Medicine. UK Biobank: scale, depth, duration … but, most importantly, accessibility’
The first session of the EBW scientific programme was the keynote delivered by Sir Rory Collins, Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of UK Biobank. The subject of his talk was ‘Biobanking for Precision and Genomics Medicine. UK Biobank: scale, depth, duration … but, most importantly, accessibility’.
Afterwards, Sir Collins highlighted the achievements of the Uk Biobank and underlined the importance of making data and samples available to scientist all over the world:
“Sharing data is the way to honor the altruism of people who take part in their studies. They make their data available in order to improve health. And by sharing data, those data are much more valuable for improving the way in which we protect populations, improving the way in which we treat patients by learning as much as possible from those data”.
UKBiobank has a cohort of 500,000 participants. He explained how they achieved this level of engagement:
“We wrote to some 9 million people, who are aged 40 to 69, across England, Scotland, Wales. Half a million of them were willing to come and spend five hours with us to give us information about their lifestyle, environment, etc., to allow us to measure them, allow us to take biological samples. That in itself was a big ask”.
Sir Collins remarked how crucial it is the concept of trust in the fields of biobanking and scientific and medical research:
“More importantly, they were giving us their trust. You know, every day, every minute of every day, we’re aware of that, that, we have to continue to earn that trust. That means making sure that the data are used, but also that they are used in ways that are consistent with the consent that those participants gave”.
The keynote set the tone for the day with parallel sessions immediately after covering topics such as: ‘Role of biobanks in the future of healthcare research’, ‘Training and education for quality improvement and knowledge generation’, ‘Information security and data privacy’ and ‘The road towards ISO 20387 accreditation’.
Sir Rory Collins
Rory Collins is a medically-qualified epidemiologist who studies how to prevent and treat cardiovascular disease in large international population-based studies. He is the founding Head of Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health.
During the past 40 years, he has conducted large randomised trials which have shown unequivocally that clot-dissolving and clot- preventing treatments during a heart attack can more than halve mortality, and that lowering LDL-cholesterol with statin therapy safely reduces the risk of cardiovascular death and disability among a wide range of people. As a consequence, these treatments are being widely used.
In 2005, the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council appointed him as Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of UK Biobank. Involving 500,000 participants, it is the largest deeply- characterized prospective study globally, available for any type of health research that is in the public interest. More than 30,000 researchers worldwide use it currently, generating more than 3000 papers in 2023 alone.