So far we have created a truly unique resource for sub-Saharan Africa supporting a wide range of robust and innovative study designs providing novel insights into the complexities of nutrition-disease interactions. Recent outputs have appeared in journals covering basic science (PLoSGenetics, Genome Biology, Human Molecular Genetics, Nature Communications, FASEBJ and Scientific Reports, with papers currently under review at Genome Biology and Cell), medicine (EBioMedicine, PLoSMedicine, Lancet, JAMA) and global public health (Lancet Global Health, PNAS) as well as in the core nutrition journals (AJCN, J Nutr). We summarise some of these experimental approaches and the insights they have yielded below. To date these outputs have all been driven by the local MRCG investigators with assistance from expert international collaborators as appropriate to each study. This approach has been very successful but is necessarily constrained by the intellectual bandwidth of the core investigators, the time available and by funding. The resource has ample spare capacity to be used more intensively.

Our challenge now is to capitalise on the existing legacy of the MRC’s, investigators’ and participants’ investment to maximise academic outputs with strong pathways to impact in global health. To achieve this we wish to partner with a large team of investigators based in Bristol around the trio of infrastructure between the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), the Bristol Bioresource Laboratory (BBL) and the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU). Together they have created a world leading system of cohort curation, resource storage and use which is exemplified, inter alia, by the fact that ALSPAC has just celebrated its 1500th publication and remains routinely used (for bioresources and data) by a large and active international collaborator group. We will work with the Bristol teams across a wide range of disciplines (legal and governance, human tissue biobanking, laboratory practices, genotyping and epigenotyping, data archiving and mining, bioinformatics and publicity) to ‘clone and adapt’ their existing procedures in order to professionalise and externalise what we will term the West African BioResource (WABR).