UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project

Industry consortium mapping how genetic variation affects blood protein levels.

TL;DR Mapped the genetics of about 3,000 plasma proteins in 54,000 UK Biobank participants, a dataset now widely used for drug target discovery.

The UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP) was a pre-competitive consortium of 13 pharmaceutical companies and UK Biobank. It measured about 3,000 plasma proteins in 54,219 participants with the Olink Proximity Extension Assay. The main analysis, published in Nature (Sun et al., 2023), mapped protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs) and their links to disease. It is one of the largest maps so far of how genetic variation affects blood protein levels.

For that paper, I fine-mapped the pQTLs and ran colocalization with expression QTLs (eQTLs). The UKB-PPP data are now widely used across the industry for Mendelian randomization, drug target validation, and multi-omics work.

Related: Translational Proteomics for Obesity Clinical Trials, the clinical trial work at Lilly that applies the pQTL and proteomic methods from UKB-PPP.

References

2023

  1. Plasma proteomic associations with genetics and health in the UK Biobank
    Measured about 3,000 blood proteins in 54,000 UK Biobank participants and mapped more than 14,000 genetic variants that influence their levels, most of them previously unknown.
    Sun BB, Chiou J, Traylor M, and 62 more authors
    Nature, 2023
    DOI Scholar

Card image: Figure adapted from Sun et al., Nature 2023 (Fig. 2a), CC BY 4.0.