Our funding

UK Biobank funders have enabled the creation and development of our world-leading health research resource.

UK Biobank was established by the medical charity Wellcome, the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Department of Health, the Scottish Government and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

We are grateful to the dedication and support of our core funders, who have committed core funding until 2029. This support makes it possible for UK Biobank to deliver on our aim of supporting the global research community to advance our understanding of disease.

Core funding

We are a non-profit charity and have been awarded core funding of over £180 million so far.

Core funding has enabled the recruitment of participants, the secure management of the consented data relating to these participants, the linkage of the resource to participant healthcare records and the opening of the resource to the research community for the purposes of health research.

UK Biobank’s core funding is provided by a collaboration of Wellcome, MRC, Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

In the past we have also received core funding from the Welsh Government and Diabetes UK.

Philanthropic funding

In 2023, we established a philanthropic funding consortium, comprising gifts from Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google; and Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel and founder of Griffin Catalyst. Their total £16m contribution was matched by the UK Government.

In 2024 it was announced that Amazon Web Services were contributing £8m worth of cloud storage to UK Biobank as part of the consortium, unlocking a further £8m from the UK Government.

Infrastructure funding

We announced in May 2023 that we had been granted £127.6m from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund. We are using the funding to move to a larger, faster, and more efficient purpose-built facility at Bruntwood SciTech’s Manchester Science Park.

The facility will enable new projects to turn the biological samples into data and drive discoveries into how to prevent and treat a wide range of diseases.

Our new facility

Additional funding

We have also received funding for the following major enhancements.

Genotyping of all 500,000 participants (from the Department of Health, MRC and the British Heart Foundation).

Measuring biochemistry markers in all 500,000 participants (from Wellcome, MRC, the British Heart Foundation and Diabetes UK).

Imaging of 100,000 participants (Wellcome, MRC, the British Heart Foundation) and re-imaging of 10,000 participants (Dementias Platform UK).

Repeat imaging of up to 60,000 participants from the imaging project (MRC, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Calico).

Whole genome sequencing of all 500,000 participants (MRC, UKRI, Wellcome, and the pharmaceutical companies Amgen, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Johnson & Johnson).