China kadoorie biobank - University of Oxford

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China has undergone a rapid transition in disease patterns, with chronic non-communicable diseases such as stroke, ischaemic heart disease (IHD), cancer and emphysema (COPD) accounting for most of the remaining mortality and disability. For these diseases, there are still large unexplained variations in the age specific rates between different countries and between different regions in China, indicating that important causes remain to be discovered. Heterogeneity in disease rates, non-genetic risk factors and genetic architecture, between Chinese and Western populations, and between different parts of China, helps identify new risk factors and explore known causes more comprehensively. This is particularly true for stroke, which is much less well understood in terms of genetic and non-genetic determinants than IHD.2,5,6 Stroke can be investigated particularly effectively in China, as disease rates are high and widespread use of CT/MRI allows reliable determination of stroke subtypes. Better understanding of the genetic and environmental causes of disease can lead to improvements in disease prevention, risk prediction and development of new therapies. Although retrospective case-control studies suffice for studying purely genetic factors, large bloodbased prospective studies are required for studying many non-genetic causes, and many interactions.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in Caucasian have identified many disease correlates. However, some loci extend over hundreds of kilobases, involving several genes and many variants that are indistinguishable because of linkage disequilibrium (LD). Comparisons of GWAS data from the Chinese and Caucasian populations will provide opportunities to exploit local LD structure in different ethnic groups, leading to finer mapping of these known loci.
To maximise the potential of the CKB as a comprehensive and unique biomedical research resource, we wish to undertake cohort-wide genotyping, using a custom-designed 700K SNP array (Affymetrix) optimised for Chinese populations. Newton Fund support would be used exclusively for genotyping and imputation, and will allow up to 100,000 participants to be genotyped within two years. To complete genotyping of the entire CKB cohort of 0.5 million participants, additional funding will be sought from other sources in the UK and elsewhere. Because extensive baseline information and follow-up information already exists, and planned multi-omics assays of the stored biological samples is likely to be funded from other sources, information from the proposed genotyping would create a uniquely powerful and rich resource for biomedical research over the next decade or more.