Leveraging Biomedical Data to Understand and Fight Disease

Griffin Catalyst is supporting a major enhancement of UK Biobank, one of the world’s leading scientific resources for health data and biological samples. Griffin Catalyst’s $10 million gift—matched by Eric Schmidt and Schmidt Futures—will enable UK Biobank and scientists from around the world to accelerate research into disease mechanisms, to better leverage artificial intelligence, and to work towards more personalized options for treatment.
Photo Credit: Rory Arnold
Griffin Catalyst Founder Ken Griffin speaks at an event announcing a new public-private consortium to support UK Biobank at 10 Downing Street, London, on October 30, 2023.

First launched in 2006, UK Biobank has grown to be one of the largest and most thorough biomedical databases in the world, encompassing genetic, physical, and health data from 500,000 volunteers. This vast resource for health research, augmented regularly with new data, has enabled groundbreaking discovery globally into disease cause and progression.

Who We’re Supporting

UK Biobank’s vast trove of data is uniquely available to researchers across the world. Currently, over 30,000 researchers from more than 90 countries are registered to use UK Biobank, including 10,000 researchers in the United States alone. With its steady growth in data and with new technologies, UK Biobank is becoming the world’s preeminent biomedical database.

To achieve that goal, UK Biobank is enhancing its older infrastructure with cutting-edge equipment, including a latest-generation robotic freezer that can store and swiftly retrieve—four times faster than at present—the 20 million biological samples that have been donated by UK Biobank’s half-million volunteer participants.  At the same time, UK Biobank is accelerating its efforts to digitize tens of thousands of older medical slides associated with tumor biopsies, among other illnesses, readying these samples for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

To make room for these new initiatives, the U.K. government recently announced a £154 million investment into UK Biobank’s physical infrastructure for a purpose-built 131,000-square-foot facility in Manchester Science Park, in the heart of the city’s Oxford Road Corridor Innovation District.  Operated with the support of The University of Manchester, this new state-of-the-art facility will accommodate improved biological storage and processing laboratories and will expand access for researchers from around the country and the world.

Griffin Catalyst’s support for UK Biobank will enable essential follow-on research into how participants’ health has changed over the years and how wearable technologies impact health assessments, as well as into biomarkers for early disease detection. These collective donations to UK Biobank will allow cutting-edge AI applications to draw upon these datasets to drive new insights and discoveries into how to treat, or even prevent a wide range of disease.

With philanthropic support from Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures, this public-private consortium complements the U.K. government’s investments in research and development to provide new funding pathways for the world’s most gifted researchers to take greater risks and to pursue new approaches.

Why It Matters

Far too often, doctors detect many types of serious or fatal diseases—such as pancreatic cancer—too late. By the time patients are experiencing symptoms, there are often no effective interventions.

One emerging solution is the use of biomarkers, whose discovery can enable early diagnosis of life-threatening diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s disease—even before patients themselves experience any symptoms.  Advances in AI can empower researchers to analyze and interpret UK Biobank’s immense data.  In one such breakthrough, in 2018, researchers analyzing genomic data from UK Biobank were able to devise a genetic test to detect people born with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, thus alerting doctors and allowing proactive measures to be carried out before life-threatening situations arise.

As it expands its work into other areas, UK Biobank will also continue its existing pioneering data collection—including the world’s largest imaging study of internal organs, which will open up new ways to investigate mechanisms for diseases as diverse as arthritis, coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer’s.

What’s the Impact

The expansion and upgrade of UK Biobank—already recognized as a key global scientific resource—will enable it to extend its service to medicine and biology and, through improved biomarkers and other techniques, lay the groundwork for future scientific discoveries that will dramatically improve human health and treatment.

An important benefit of UK Biobank’s efforts relates to the development of new medications; biomarkers allow for shorter, less expensive clinical trials, leading companies to invest additional resources into the discovery of new drugs, and thus bring new treatments to the public more swiftly.

What no one can put a number to is the sheer human impact that the early detection of life-threatening diseases will have for patients everywhere.

Photo Credit: Rory Arnold

Griffin Catalyst Founder Ken Griffin (far left) joined with UK Biobank Chief Scientist Naomi Allen (center left), Schmidt Futures Co-Founder Eric Schmidt (center right), and U.K. Minister of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology George Freeman (far right) to celebrate the launch of a new public-private consortium to unlock U.K. government-matching-funding in support of UK Biobank.

IN BRIEF

May 20, 2024
In December 2023, Griffin Catalyst and the David Geffen Foundation announced a gift of $400 million to New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the most renowned and advanced cancer research and treatment institutions in the world. This landmark gift—the largest donation to the institution in its nearly 150-year history—will allow MSK to significantly expand and upgrade its research, educational, and treatment facilities toward a singular goal: eradicating cancer.
August 30, 2024
Since 2023, Griffin Catalyst has announced transformative gifts to three major health care institutions in Miami. Taken together, the support—totaling $125 million—represents an investment in the future of medical care and research in South Florida.
October 28, 2024
Griffin Catalyst provided a seed gift of $2.5 million to accelerate the efforts of Feng Zhang, a faculty member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, to develop “programmable therapeutics,” an approach that holds promise for revolutionizing medicine by reprogramming cells to cure a wide range of human diseases.
June 17, 2025
How did the end of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa impact world history? That’s what researchers aim to uncover during a five-year project of excavation and analysis in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. Their study will explore fossil ecosystems and the biodiversity of sub-Saharan Africa during the Late Cretaceous Period to dramatically expand scientists’ currently limited understanding of this important epoch.
April 17, 2025
Griffin Catalyst is proud to partner with the nonprofit American History Unbound. The collaboration will present dramatic multimedia storytelling about World War I and World War II to audiences in New York and Miami, and nationwide through a documentary being filmed for broadcast on public television later this year, to coincide with Veterans Day. The unique combination of narration and imagery from renowned historian John Monsky, accompanied by music from Broadway stars and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, brings to life in new ways two of the most pivotal events in the 20th century.
May 31, 2024
Launched in 2023, the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority leverages the power of competition and innovation to support start-ups, scale solutions to local problems, and improve lives.
May 23, 2024
To pay tribute to the nation's most distinguished military heroes—and to unite our country around the values their stories represent—Griffin Catalyst is supporting the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation with a $30 million gift. The National Medal of Honor Griffin Institute is a key component of a three-pronged, $300 million effort that also includes a new museum in Arlington, Texas, and a new monument in Washington, D.C.
February 12, 2024
The Lincoln Memorial has long been one of America’s most visited monuments and the scene of some of the defining moments of the last century. In time for the 250th anniversary of the country, a new expansion project will transform a massive, long-hidden space beneath the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall into an immersive museum, exhibition, and theater space, encouraging visitors to explore the story of one of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, and to learn about the nation’s progress toward becoming a more perfect union.
December 27, 2023
The success of Operation Warp Speed in 2020, which brought forth an effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than twelve months, was not only a scientific breakthrough but also a demonstration of the power of an approach called an advanced market commitment (AMC). By creating a demand so that pharmaceutical companies could invest in production prior to proving the efficacies of vaccines, this successful approach accelerated time to market and highlighted the opportunity for a class of similar “market-shaping tools” to accelerate progress. To expand this approach, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures have partnered with the University of Chicago to launch