Nightingale will perform large-scale metabolic profiling of the Mexico City Prospective Study cohort by analyzing the biomarker profiles of blood samples from a cohort of 150,000 study participants. Contracted by the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford, Nightingale will provide novel biomarker data to accelerate research into the chronic disease risk of Hispanic populations.

Nightingale’s acclaimed biomarker profiling technology measures metabolic biomarkers that recent studies have found to be predictive of future risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes and many other common chronic diseases. Until recently, technological constraints and prohibitive costs have prevented the analysis of comprehensive biomarker data from large-scale population collections. Nightingale's technology now makes this viable by measuring over 220 metabolic biomarkers from a single blood sample.

Jonathan Emberson, Associate Professor, Medical Statistics and Epidemiology in the Nuffield Department of Population Health, said: “The Mexico City Prospective Study provides researchers with a unique opportunity to investigate the major causes of death in a Hispanic population. Biomarker profiling will allow us to better understand how lifestyle, environment and genetics combine to cause diseases such as cardiovascular disease in a population with high levels of obesity and diabetes.”

Nightingale will perform the assays within 12 months allowing researchers to start investigating the novel dataset promptly.

“The chronic disease burden is global. Therefore, it’s essential to study populations across the globe capturing ethnic and socio-economic differences that underlie disease risk,” said Teemu Suna, CEO and Founder, Nightingale Health. “Nightingale’s analysis of metabolic profiles from this cohort of 150,000 will facilitate the evaluation of effective prevention strategies and treatments for the local population. We believe that this novel initiative is a concrete step towards making chronic disease prevention a global effort.”

Nightingale has also recently announced a major initiative to analyse the biomarker profiles of 500,000 samples from the UK Biobank.



The Mexico City Prospective Study

The Mexico City Prospective Study was established by the Mexican Ministry of Health in coordination with the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, part of the Nuffield Department of Population Health, at the University of Oxford and includes 150,000 middle-aged adults (including 100,000 women and 50,000 men) recruited between 1998 and 2004. Study participants provided information about their lifestyle and disease history, along with supplying blood samples and physical measurements (including blood pressure, BMI, weight, waist and hip circumference). All participants have continued to be tracked for mortality through linkage to Mexican national mortality databases, with a follow-up resurvey of 10,000 participants between 2015 and 2018. The Mexico City Prospective study is the largest collection of blood samples linked with prospective tracking of disease events in a Mexican-American population.

For more information, please see here.

The Nuffield Department of Population Health

The Nuffield Department of Population Health (NDPH) is a world-leading research institute, based at the University of Oxford, that investigates the causes and prevention of disease. NDPH has over 500 staff working in a number of world-renowned population health research groups, including the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU), the Cancer Epidemiology Unit (CEU), the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit (NPEU) the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention (CPNP) and other groups working on public health, health economics, ethics and health record linkage. It is also a key partner in the new Oxford University Big Data Institute.

For more information, please see here.