BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - The move to set up UK Biobank, a national genomics database with samples from 500,000 people, has been slammed as a "politically driven project" by the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons.

The £45 million (US$71 million) project, billed as the world's biggest study of the role of nature and nurture in health and disease, is designed to allow researchers to uncover the genetic and environmental factors that lead to common diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease. But the committee said last week that funds were allocated to UK Biobank "before the scientific questions over its value and methodology were fully addressed."

UK Biobank, which is jointly funded by the Medical Research Council and the research charity, The Wellcome Trust, already has government approval to go ahead with collecting DNA samples and health and lifestyle information from 50,000 volunteers aged between 45 and 69. Those individuals will then be tracked for 10 years through their national health service records.

However, the committee questioned the peer-review process, saying it was not clear the MRC funding for Biobank was granted on the same basis as any other grant proposal. "Our impression is that a scientific case for Biobank has been put together by funders to support a politically driven project," it said.

The committee cited concerns that using a cohort, rather than a case study, design may be inadequate to identify gene-environment interactions. At the same time the large number of subjects will make it difficult to compile sufficiently detailed lifestyle and environmental data to get at the causes of complex diseases, and medical records do not provide the necessary data for meaningful research.

As a result the rationale behind UK Biobank does not have widespread confidence in the scientific community. To address that, the committee said the comments of the 12 experts involved in UK Biobank's peer review should be published anonymously.

The committee also criticized the public consultation carried out by the MRC to secure public approval for a national genomics database, saying it was not extensive enough, and it was not clear how the results had fed into the development of the project. "The MRC's consultation for UK Biobank has been a bolt-on activity to secure widespread support, rather than a genuine attempt to build consensus," the committee said.

The criticisms of UK Biobank form part of an extremely critical report of the MRC's work. The MRC said it was "extremely disappointed" at the report overall, and strongly refuted the charge that UK Biobank is politically driven. "It is being established to use the information generated by the Human Genome Project to improve the health of the public and meet the research needs of the scientific community in their efforts to develop better health care," it said.