This story has been updated to include additional information from the UK Biobank.
NEW YORK – The UK Biobank said Friday that it has launched a new study to profile the plasma proteome in all of its participants to build the world's most expansive dataset so far of proteins circulating in the blood.
The study aims to measure up to 5,400 proteins in 600,000 blood samples, including those taken from half a million UK Biobank participants when they joined the program and 100,000 additional samples provided by some participants up to 15 years later.
The UK Biobank said the study will begin this quarter by analyzing the first 300,000 samples, including 250,000 from participants and 50,000 provided by volunteers at follow-up assessments.
The UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP), a consortium of 14 biopharmaceutical companies, will fund the analysis of these first 300,000 samples. They include Alden Scientific, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Calico Life Sciences, Roche, GSK, Isomorphic Labs, Johnson & Johnson, MSD, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Takeda Pharmaceutical.
Previously, the UKB-PPP conducted a pilot study to systematically profile nearly 3,000 circulating plasma proteins in more than 54,000 individuals from the UK Biobank. That study, published in Nature in 2023, paved the way for the current project.
According to the UK Biobank, it will take about a year to generate the data in the initial 300,000 participant samples.
The Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC), part Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, will conduct the protein detection and sequencing. RGC will use the Olink Explore HT affinity proteomics assay from Thermo Fisher Scientific and the UG 100 sequencing platform from Ultima Genomics for the study.
In an email, a UK Biobank spokesperson said the UKB-PPP consortium chose Thermo Fisher's Olink assay after conducting "comparative technical, commercial, and logistic evaluations versus Somalogic’s SomaScan and Illumina’s ProteinPrep technologies." In addition, the spokesperson noted that the UKB-PPP picked the Ultima platform after observing "strong correlations and lower cost" following comparative assessments of the Olink assay generated using UG 100 instruments versus the Illumina NovaSeq instruments.
Regeneron signed a development agreement with Ultima in 2022 and reported on its experience with the platform at last year's Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference. A company spokesperson declined to comment on whether the firm has previous experience with the Olink assay on the UG 100 platform and how many Ultima sequencers the RGC currently operates.
In an email, Ultima Genomics CEO Gilad Almogy said the UG 100 platform was selected for the project "through a rigorous and highly competitive technology evaluation process." Factors such as quality, data accuracy, complementarity with Olink’s proteomics technology, cost-effectiveness, and reliability were "thoroughly evaluated" during the process, he noted.
Almogy declined to say whether the company is providing any in-kind contributions to the study. "While the specifics of the commercial arrangements are confidential, Ultima is fully committed to supporting the success of this transformative study and enabling its long-term impact on human health and personalized medicine," he said.
The UK Biobank said the proteomics data will be made available to approved researchers in staggered releases starting in 2026, with the full dataset expected to be added to the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform, a cloud data analysis developed by DNAnexus, by 2027.
Before the data are made available to UK Biobank-approved researchers, industry members of UKB-PPP will have nine months of exclusive access.
So far, the UK Biobank has released whole-genome sequencing data for its 500,000 participants as well as magnetic resonance imaging data for nearly 100,000 of these.
The biobank said it hopes the proteomics dataset will enable researchers to examine how and why blood protein levels change over time as well as to create opportunities for developing AI models.
"For the first time at this scale, researchers will be able to detect the exact causes of diseases by comparing how protein levels change over mid-to-late life in a large group of people," UK Biobank Principal Investigator and Chief Executive Rory Collins said in a statement. "Proteomic data has already paved the way for better cancer, autoimmune, and dementia diagnostics, and this truly exciting study of proteins will significantly speed up drug discovery, leading to major improvements in public health and care everywhere."
While the UK Biobank is working to produce the data for the initial 300,000 samples, it will also seek additional funding to analyze the remaining half.