UK Biobank reaches 500,000 participants (2010)
The UK Biobank, funded by Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, and the NHS, enrolled 500,000 British adults between 2006 and 2010. Each gave blood and urine samples, agreed to genotyping, and consented to long-term linkage with their NHS health records.
Researchers gained access to a population-scale resource linking genotype to clinical outcomes, billed at modest fees for academic use.
UK Biobank has powered thousands of published studies and is the data source behind major pharma deals, including Regeneron's 2014 exome-sequencing partnership.
Helix is building the equivalent for North America. The 500,000 threshold matters because UK Biobank set it as the scale needed for statistical power on rare variants.
