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Fiona fox's blog
This autumn over three million UK adults will receive a letter inviting them to join the Our Future Health research programme – designed to transform the prevention, detection, and treatment of diseases. This first wave of large-scale recruitment is part of a plan to bring together five million volunteers by 2025 to create a world-leading resource for health research.
Our Future Health is making ambitious claims that it will truly represent the UK adult population, so that it will be possible to make discoveries that benefit everyone. They claim that combining multiple sources of health and health-relevant information, including genetic data, will create an incredibly detailed picture that will support new discoveries in methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of diagnostic tools to help identify and treat diseases early when outcomes are usually better.
Journalists dialled in to this briefing to put their questions to the panel on why this is important, and whether and how it can be done in the UK at such a huge scale.
Speakers included:
Professor Sir John Bell, Chairperson, Our Future Health
Dr Raghib Ali OBE, Chief Medical Officer, Our Future Health
Dr Andrew Roddam, CEO, Our Future Health
Professor Cathie Sudlow OBE, inaugural Director of the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre and Chair of Neurology and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh