Document is current

Article History

Received: 11 September 2021

Accepted: 22 November 2021

First Online: 7 December 2021

Declarations

:

: UK Biobank has approval from the North West Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee (MREC), which covers the UK. It also sought the approval in England and Wales from the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG) for gaining access to information that would allow it to invite people to participate. PIAG has since been replaced by the National Information Governance Board for Health & Social Care (NIGB). In Scotland, UK Biobank has approval from the Community Health Index Advisory Group (CHIAG).

: UK Biobank possesses a Human Tissue Authority (HTA) licence, so a separate HTA licence is not required by researchers who receive samples from the resource. Instead of requiring each applicant to obtain separate ethics approval, UK Biobank has sought generic Research Tissue Bank (RTB) approval, which should cover the large majority of research using the resource. This approach is recommended by the National Research Ethics Service and UK Biobank’s governing Research Ethics Committee (REC), which approved the application in 2010.

: The authors declare that there is no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.