How mega banks of data are helping scientists make great leaps in cancer research

Despite the advances in cancer research over the past 40 years, including World Cancer Research Fund’s evidence on cancer prevention, and dramatic advances in cancer treatment, one question remains to be answered: why does one person get cancer when another, who lives a similar lifestyle, does not?
Experts estimate that up to 40% of cancer cases are preventable, if people didn’t smoke, avoided the sun, avoided alcohol, ate a healthy diet, maintained a healthy body weight and stayed physically active. But that doesn’t mean we can reduce our own risk of cancer by 40% if we follow this advice. It’s not easy to estimate an individual’s cancer risk because so many biological and genetic factors are also at play.
And that’s where large databases about our health can make a big difference. One of these is the UK Biobank, which contains details about the health – and increasingly, as the participants get older, the ill-health, of 500,000 people in the UK. The longevity of this data – not just at one point in a person’s life but repeatedly measured over a long period of time – helps us understand what influences cancer risk throughout someone’s life.
Heel bone density to house size
Since 2006, the UK Biobank has been collecting environmental, lifestyle and genetic information about the participants. For scientists, the size, range of information – from heel bone density to blood pressure to the size of their house – and duration of information collected is a gold mine.
It has been described as “the world’s most important health database” yet it’s not the only resource of this type. Another large database established as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study has grown into a massive project involving 10 countries, with 521,000 participants and data collected over more than 30 years.
Of the 30,000 registered researchers from 100 countries who have used data from the UK Biobank, some are funded by the World Cancer Research Fund network, and are using the data to investigate a range of cancer risk factors:
- Sleep, sleep patterns, and risk of prostate and endometrial cancer
- Fat tissue and advanced prostate cancer risk
- Social inequality and cancer risk
- Physical activity, sedentary behaviours, and cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes
- Plant-based diets
- Ultra-processed food
- Following our Cancer Prevention Recommendations
- Obesity and insulin
- Vegetarian diets
- Links between diabetes and cancer
- How many cancers are linked to obesity and physical activity?
Some of the things our scientists have found out using UK Biobank data include:
- Physical activity across the day – with a peak early in the morning and late in the evening – linked to lower risk of colorectal cancer
- Ultra-processed food increases cancer risk
- Following our Cancer Prevention Recommendations reduces the risk of all cancers
The UK Biobank allows researchers around the world to look at biological and medical data and “supports a diverse range of research intended to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and the promotion of health throughout society”.
And it’s not easy to get hold of such large amounts of data. It’s hard to get half a million people to consent to sharing their personal data in this way, and even harder to get them to keep filling in surveys and undergoing procedures over many years. This type of research can only be done with people’s support and willingness to consent, and without it, finding ways to prevent and treat diseases such as cancer will be so much harder.
The wealth of data the UK Biobank contains could have drastic implications for cancer research, perhaps even finally helping realise World Cancer Research Fund’s ambition of living in a world where no one dies of a preventable cancer.