Our Future Health will be the UK’s largest ever health research programme. It is designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection, and treatment of diseases. Today, millions of people in the UK and around the world spend many years of their later life in poor health. Too often, we treat diseases only when patients start showing symptoms, which is both costly and less effective. By developing a more detailed understanding of what makes certain people more likely to develop a disease, plus what to look out for before any symptoms appear, Our Future Health has the potential to help to develop far more effective approaches to both prevention and treatment.

Our Future Health will collect and link multiple sources of health and lifestyle information, including genetic data, across a cohort of 5 million adult volunteers that truly reflects the UK population. Participants will provide information about themselves as well a small sample of their blood which will be analysed for genetic information as well as stored for future use. This will be combined with their health records and other digital information about them to provide an in-depth picture of their health. Every participant will have the option of receiving health related feedback based on the information that is collected.

Our Future Health will provide two key resources for health research:

A prospective observational dataset with the ability to analyse the stored blood samples, for basic science/epidemiological, discovery and aetiological research e.g., on the causes and early signs of disease; and; A consent to contact cohort of people who can be re-contacted based on their characteristics including future risk of disease. They could be invited to take part in further data collection (including repeat blood samples), interventional and large-scale implementation research to develop and test new diagnostic technologies, prevention strategies and treatments.

Our Future Health will be a world-leading resource for health research. The combination of its scale, population diversity, and risk-based recall of participants will set it aside from other programmes. It could hold the key to huge numbers of discoveries. Researchers from universities, charities, the NHS and companies involved in health research will have the chance to apply to use Our Future Health resources to discover and test more effective ways to predict, detect and treat common diseases such as dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

The programme has funding from UK Research and Innovation (the UK Government-funded body that invests in science and research), as well as from leading life science companies and is being delivered in partnership with the NHS.
 
If you are interested in participating in the initiative please visit https://ourfuturehealth.org.uk/