EMPOWER-1: A Multi-site Clinical Cohort Research Study to Reduce Health Inequality

This multi-centre real-world study will recruit patients across different National Health Service (NHS) sites based in England, where the overall patient population demographic profile is sufficiently variable to allow for meaningful representation of different ethnicities in the analysis of pooled data-sets. The study addresses the issue of health inequality and genetic disparity in the United Kingdom (UK) by recruiting up to 200,000 patients primarily from the three main ethnic groups in the UK; namely White (Caucasian), African-Caribbean (Black), and South Asian (Asian) populations on a 1:1:1 ratio. Biological samples, medical records, alongside specific questionnaires will be used in data analyses to help identify treatment failures in different populations for the 19 disease areas under investigation, which are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality in the UK. Analysis of patient populations may provide real-world evidence around disease prevalence between and within different ethnic groups. The data may also support hypothesis driven genetic analysis to identify putative bio-markers associated with treatment failure. Data from this study will be published, and findings could better inform clinical practice in the management of diseases that cause significant poor health and death in the different populations that represent the UK.