Selecting participants can deliver advantages in refining a study to focus on the most suitable people.
In contrast, when recruiting using posters or using clinics, researchers can only categorise participants on criteria such as age, gender and condition. These programmes are unfocused and time consuming; researchers might have to recruit very large numbers of participants to ensure they include enough people who have a particular genetic make-up of interest.
For example, in a programme studying a common genetic variant that occurs in approximately 1 in 10 people, researchers would have to recruit about 500 participants to find 50 with the genetic variation of interest.
The NIHR BioResource approach is more time efficient: with 20,000 participants ready to take part, it is much simpler to find 50 with the selected genotype and research ready.
Our effort can be focused on identifying the participants needed for your study. If you submit a request, we can screen DNA samples in advance of participant selection for the particular gene or variant of interest.
Consequently we invite to take part only those people who have the genetic variation that is important to your study. Valuable functional research is now possible into the causes of many diseases that previously would have proven too costly or time-consuming.
Our aim is to make your research more efficient.
Our unique data
How to apply to use BioResource data
