Comprehensive biomarker profiles of Mexico City Prospective Study blood samples to be analyzed.

Nightingale Health, the Finnish innovator of an internationally recognized blood biomarker technology for studying chronic diseases, 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.