3 million people in the UK will be invited to participate in a project to diagnose and treat diseases early.
The project, called Our Future Health, will eventually recruit 5 million or more people from all walks of life, with participants sharing their health records and giving blood samples, as well as having their weight, blood pressure and cholesterol measured
Prof Sir John Bell, of the University of Oxford, who is chairing the project, said healthcare systems tend to be geared towards treating people once they develop symptoms and often in the final stages of a disease.
He said that with new tools, it was possible to detect a chronic disease early or identify people at higher risk of it before it develops.
He said that the principle applied to a wide range of conditions.
Bell said the goal was to create a sandbox for testing and evaluating early diagnostic or prevention strategies. We will be able to use that population to help us evaluate the new tools, diagnose the disease early, and intervene at an earlier stage.
According to Dr Raghib Ali, the chief medical officer of the project, detecting disease earlier will produce better outcomes for patients.
The approach would save money for the health service. He said that most of the costs of care are in the final stages.
The UK's largest health research programme is expected to be built on the success of research resources such as the UK Biobank.
The team said its project went further, not only in recruiting a larger pool of participants but also ensuring they came from a wide range of socio-economic and ethnic groups.
The project will give participants the chance to receive feedback on their risks of various diseases, initially focused on diabetes and heart disease. The team wanted to give participants at risk of certain conditions the option to join screening programmes or further research.
To begin to evaluate interventions, you have to have enough people in the study at high risk with a disease, but as soon as we get there, we will be trying new interventions.
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The team said anyone could sign up to participate if they received an invitation to join the project.
consent would be sought from participants at different stages of the project, and patient data would be de-identified before it was used.
The UK government and life sciences companies have funding in place to recruit and collect initial data for up to 5 million people.
He said that the project was important and that it would take a decade to 20 years. The healthcare system will collapse if we don't do this.
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