The UK Biobank had a problem. It was big — roughly 500,000 participants with genomes and health records. But it was also overwhelmingly white.
That limits what you can learn. A drug that works for a white European may not work for someone of African or Asian ancestry.
A genetic risk score built on European DNA can be useless — even harmful — for other populations. The National Institutes of Health just answered that problem. On June 30, it announced that its All of Us research programme has assembled 747,000 participants.
The number that matters: 535,000 whole genomes linked to 482,000 electronic health records. That bundle includes doctor’s notes, diagnoses, and testing results.
The UK Biobank, the prior leader, held genomes and health records for about 500,000 people. Size alone is not the story. The UK Biobank was almost entirely white European.
All of Us recruits from diverse backgrounds across the United States. That is the fundamental shift. If you want to practice personalised medicine — treatments tailored to an individual’s genetics, environment, and lifestyle — you need data that reflects the real population.
The database does not stop at genomes and clinic visits. It pulls in data from wearable technology such as Fitbits.
It includes health surveys on socioeconomic factors. It tracks location-based exposure data including air quality. That is a lot of inputs.
The UK Biobank collected some of these things, but its homogeneity was baked in from the start. Alicia Martin, a statistical geneticist at the Broad Institute, already uses All of Us data.
She called the diversity “one of the most exciting components.” She said the database “offers forward-thinking opportunities to try to understand not just who is at risk of disease, but also who is more likely to progress or have some exacerbated health condition, and who is going to respond to specialised treatments.” The programme started in 2018. That is fast. The UK Biobank launched in 2006 and took years to reach its scale.
All of Us hit 747,000 participants in about six years. It also linked 535,000 whole genomes to health records. The UK Biobank has about 500,000 genomes linked to health records.
The numbers are close. The difference is the diversity.
That diversity is not just about ancestry. It is about environment. A person in Detroit breathes different air than someone in rural Montana.
A person in a food desert has different health risks than someone with a supermarket two blocks away. All of Us captures that.
The UK Biobank, for all its size, could not answer those questions for most Americans. Researchers can now investigate causes and treatments across a population that looks like the United States. That is the point.
The database is built for the personalised medicine era. The UK Biobank was built for a more homogeneous era. Both are useful.
But one is now obsolete for certain questions. The NIH vaulted past the UK Biobank by the numbers.
More importantly, it vaulted past it in scope. The old database told you a lot about white Europeans. The new one can tell you about everyone else.
That is the real milestone.
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