Background
 
Our Future Health is a new prospective cohort study in the UK with the aim of recruiting 5 million UK-resident adults. Our mission is to help everyone live longer, healthier lives through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection and treatment of diseases. Our Future Health will help researchers understand today’s exposures, disease processes, and biomarkers, providing access to data, baseline biobanked blood, and the ability to selectively invite participants to additional studies and trials.
 
Methods
 
We have designed Our Future Health to provide a foundational resource for aetiological and translational research. We use a mixture of NHS and non-personalised letters to maximise engagement with Our Future Health. We also use national and local awareness activities, including engaging with under-represented communities directly to enhance diversity and geographic coverage.
 
Consenting participants complete a baseline questionnaire and book an appointment to donate a blood sample and provide cardiac and anthropometric measures.
Genotyping is conducted using a custom fully up-to-date 700,000-variant array that is optimised for multi-ethnic imputation.
 
High priority data linkages include primary and secondary care, cancer registration and treatment, and death registration.
 
Results
 
By December 2025, 2.5 million participants had consented, 1.9 million had completed the baseline questionnaire, 1.9 million people had been linked with electronic health-related data including dispensed mediations, and over 1.5 million had provided health metrics and blood samples, making Our Future Health the world's largest health research study of its type.
 
The cohort has high diversity with over 1 million participants from historically under-represented groups including:
 
650,000 18–40-year-olds, facilitating research into diseases that disproportionately affect younger people such as obesity, mental health disorders and addiction.
300,000 from ethnic minority groups including over 150,000 South Asians and over 50,000 from Black, Chinese, Eastern European and Mixed groups.
300,000 from the most deprived quintile of the index of multiple deprivation. 
With over 1.4 million participants already genotyped, Our Future Health is providing the world’s largest and most diverse genetic cohort that will catalyse discovery and translation research.
 
We have measured lipids on over 1 million participants and are conducting a deeper assessment of lipid and clinical chemistry on a 300,000 sub-cohort. Our Future Health will continue to expand exposure assessments including deploying additional questionnaires, assessing cognitive function and biomarkers, and expanded omics data layers.
 
Implications
 
Our Future Health is a globally unique programme that will help transform our understanding of health and disease. As the programme continues towards its aim of 5 million participants, we will continue to expand aetiological and translational research possibilities.
 
Many promising diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers fail at the stage of prospective evaluation. Our Future Health will help to solve this by being a translational catalyst by facilitating researcher access to selected stored biosamples.
 
Our Future Health Clinical Research Recruitment Service launches in April 2026 and will be a world-leading clinical trials accelerator with millions of pre-consented, pre-screened participants who we can selectively invite based on health-related data including recall by genotype and recall-by-phenotype.