Unlocking half a million metabolomes: UK Biobank data analyzed by Nightingale Health now available to researchers
Dec 05, 2025
Nightingale Health has previously completed metabolomics profiling for the entire UK Biobank cohort of 500,000 participants – a milestone in large-scale ’omics research. This achievement marked the first time an ’omics technology was scaled to the full dataset, providing researchers with unprecedented access to comprehensive metabolic data. This complete dataset is now available globally through the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform, enabling researchers worldwide to integrate metabolomics into large-scale studies.
What’s included in the data?
Each sample was analyzed using Nightingale Health’s NMR platform and provides 250 circulating biomarkers. These include lipoprotein subclasses, fatty acids, amino acids, ketone bodies, glycolysis intermediates, and markers related to inflammation and energy metabolism. These biomarkers reflect systemic physiology and are relevant across a wide range of diseases.
Why full-cohort coverage matters
Many UK Biobank studies focus on very specific outcomes or small subgroups, for example, leukemia cases or individuals with late onset dementia. In smaller omics subsets, stratifying data often reduces sample size significantly. Full-cohort metabolomics enables researchers to study rare outcomes and niche hypotheses without concerns about incomplete coverage.
This milestone also places metabolomics on equal footing with other major UK Biobank data layers – genetics, clinical chemistry, health records, and imaging – facilitating unbiased cross-modal analyses.
Future research opportunities
With the complete dataset now available through the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform, researchers can:
- Conduct incidence analyses across hundreds of diseases (baseline metabolite → later outcome)
- Integrate metabolite profiles with imaging or genetic data
- Explore novel associations, such as metabolic signatures linked to depression, dementia, or smoking behavior
- Develop risk models combining metabolic and clinical data
Learn more about accessing the data via the UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform.
Further insights into the UK Biobank data
To complement the dataset, Nightingale Health provides the Biomarker-Disease Atlas, an open-access resource summarizing systematic associations between 249 plasma biomarkers and 726 disease endpoints in UK Biobank.
The Atlas now includes results from the full 500,000 sample cohort, more than doubling the size of previous analyses and revealing associations for over 400 additional disease endpoints that were previously too rare to study.
Explore the Atlas and learn how metabolomics can advance your research.
Learn more:
UK Biobank Research Analysis Platform
Nightingale Health’s Biomarker-Disease Atlas
Multiomics Hub by Nightingale Health