Overview

OFH aims to find new ways to prevent, detect, and treat diseases by collecting data from up to 5 million volunteers, creating one of the most detailed views of the nation’s health.  

We’ve committed £10 million to support the programme and are working together to turn this data into practical solutions for patients, focusing on areas such as childhood cancer, dementia, rare diseases and respiratory health. 

About Our Future Health

OFH is designed to help people live longer, healthier lives through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to the prevention, earlier detection and treatment of both common and rare diseases.  

This ambitious initiative brings together the public sector, life sciences organisations, and leading UK health charities, combining their expertise and resources to accelerate health improvements for the entire UK population through the use of clinical data. As of June 2025, 16 industry partners have joined the collaboration, as well as other leading UK medical research charities. 

OFH is designed to truly represent the diversity of the UK population, including historically underrepresented minority groups. The programme is the largest cohort of multi-ethnicities in the UK, people of non-European ancestry in the world, young people and working age populations, and over 60s. 

OFH has recruited almost 2.5 million consenting participants to the programme. Of these, more than 1.4 million have completed their baseline questionnaire, attended a clinic appointment and provided a blood sample, making OFH the world’s largest and most diverse consented cohort of its kind.  

The possibility to recontact participants and enhance existing data with further information such as cognitive assessment, biofluid biomarkers, whole genome sequencing, etc. opens new opportunities for early detection, intervention and recruitment into clinical trials for innovative emerging therapies. 

Interested in joining Our Future Health? Find out more on their website. 

How we will use this data

We hope to study OFH’s large-scale, longitudinal data to identify new biomarkers for disease, as well as develop new tests and treatments. In addition, we will employ data science and AI-based approaches to better understand disease risk, enable early detection and stratification for more efficient future trials. 

Read more about our first study – CohorTS – below.  

The benefit of using clinical data

Analysing large-scale, longitudinal data is extremely valuable as it enables the monitoring of health trends over time. Using advanced digital methodologies, this approach uncovers patterns and generates predictions that can: 

• develop new ways to detect diseases earlier, enabling quicker treatment, or even preventing diseases from occurring altogether 
• speed up clinical trials by identifying individuals at risk of developing certain diseases, allowing for earlier intervention and more efficient trial processes 
• identify individuals who have undergone specific treatments and are more resistant to diseases, which could lead to the development of new treatments or the repurposing of existing ones 
• advance personalised medicine, where treatments and interventions could be tailored to individual patients based on their unique medical histories and genetic profiles 
• identify differences in how diseases begin and progress in people from different backgrounds  

CohorTS study: evaluating OFH participants to address unmet patient needs  

Through this study, data science experts at LifeArc will analyse OFH’s vast data, including linked NHS data, to form and evaluate cohorts of OFH participants with diseases within our focus areas. For example, these could include people with rare dementias, rare respiratory conditions or people with a certain rare disease.  

These cohorts could be invited to specific trials and studies in the future.  

Within this study, we are currently running two projects.  

The first is ‘Endpoint Explorer’, which will build participant-finding and routine analysis tools using questionnaire data, genotype data and linked NHS data.  

The second is ‘Childhood Cancer Late Effects’. This scientific project will quantify how many adult survivors of childhood cancer have signed up to OFH, and analyse what their long-term health outcomes are in adulthood. This could help shape trials and research to improve the lives of future generations of children who have cancer.