The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is lending a hand in an ambitious project that seeks to exponentially increase new data within the U.K. Biobank, a prominent large-scale biomedical database and research resource. 

The project is aiming to complete repeat imaging on 60,000 U.K. Biobank participants to advance research on long-term physiological changes and disease progression in individuals with prior imaging in the database.  

This is the second phase of the project. The first phase began in 2014 with the collection of multi-organ MRI data from more than 50,000 participants. The latest phase seeks to acquire repeat imaging on participants who had their initial exams completed between two and seven years prior.  

Commenting on the ambitious project, Professor Paul Matthews, head of the Department of Brain Sciences and UK Dementia Research Institute Center at Imperial College London and Chair of the UK Biobank Imaging Working Group, had this to say: 

“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.”