Large scale collection of metabolomic data

Please note this is not the start of a procurement process. A separate contract notice will be published to cover this requirement.

UK Biobank is a major national health resource established with the aim of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious illnesses – including cancer, heart diseases and forms of dementia.

UK Biobank recruited 500,000 people aged between 40-69 years in 2006-2010 from across the country to take part in this project. They have undergone measures, provided blood, urine and saliva samples for future analysis, as well as detailed information about themselves and agreed to have their health followed through data linkage. Thus providing a valuable resource to discover why some people develop particular diseases and other do not, by looking at genetic and environmental data.

UK Biobank is interested in developing the resource further by collecting metabolomic data on the different types of biospecimens collected. Such a large scale collection of metabolomic data has never been undertaken so far and therefore UK Biobank would like to establish the feasibility of performing such analysis on the whole cohort or a subset of the cohort.

The purpose of this PIN is to inform the market of prospective requirements (as far as the details are known at this time) to determine feasibility and what is available.

We are interested in both targeted and/or untargeted approaches and NMR and/or mass spectrometry techniques.

Scalability will be a critical issue for the analysis of such a large number of samples and details should be provided on the reproducibility achieved according to the number of samples analysed, the multiplicity of analytical instruments used for data acquisition, and the fusion of metabolomic datasets.

In addition, any information on the comparison of performance of the proposed methods to that of established clinical assays would be welcome.

If you are interested in working with us on this PIN, please contact Andrea Howard by email at andrea.howard@ukbiobank.ac.uk, by no later than 17:00 (GMT) on Friday, 29th July 2016. You will be sent a Table to complete, detailing set criteria of what you can offer, including providing a list of metabolites quantified or semi-quantified, methods used for their estimation, quality control procedure, analytical reproducibility, time line and costs.

Data supplied on this Table will be reviewed internally by the UK Biobank Enhancement Working Group members. If you are not happy to share this information outside this group you will have the option to ‘opt out’ for some or all of the data. Opting out will not affect your chances of working with UK Biobank.