Read the full article at innovativemedicine.jnj.com.

Nearly 20 years ago, scientific leaders in the United Kingdom began an ambitious endeavor: to create UK Biobank, a uniquely powerful biomedical database for public health research. Between 2006-2010, UK Biobank recruited half a million volunteers from across the UK, collecting biological information and health-related data (including genetic, biomarker, lifestyle, imaging, and environmental information) to enable scientific discoveries into the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. The result? An impactful long-term population-cohort study, available to researchers everywhere to help improve our understanding of illnesses like heart disease, cancer, or depression so that more targeted therapies can be developed to treat, cure, and even prevent them.

In the fall of 2023, there was a major milestone in these efforts, as the scientific journal Nature published a paper sharing preliminary findings from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP), a collaboration that has generated the world’s largest proteomics dataset.

What is proteomics, and how can it help us drive progress toward precision medicine? We sat down with Chris Whelan, Ph.D. from our R&D Data Science & Digital Health team at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine – who served as lead of the collaboration and corresponding author of the paper – to learn more about what this means for science and for patients.