Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help fund repeat imaging of 60,000 patients
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.”
Matthews continued by expressing gratitude to the organizations responsible for funding the project. The Medical Research Council (MRC) and Calico Life Sciences, a biotechnology organization founded by Alphabet and Arthur D. Levinson, joined CZI in backing the £30m project. He also thanked the Biobank participants for their “dedication and altruism.”
The individual funding organizations offered additional commentary on the project, each of them expressing their excitement for the insight to come.
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In addition to her background in journalism, Hannah also has patient-facing experience in clinical settings, having spent more than 12 years working as a registered rad tech. She began covering the medical imaging industry for Innovate Healthcare in 2021.