Foresight Research

Our mission

Seeing disease earlier. Action sooner.

Many major diseases — including heart disease, dementia, diabetes and sight loss — begin developing long before symptoms appear.

Foresight’s mission is to identify the earliest signals of changing health through the eye, creating new opportunities to predict disease risk, detect disease earlier and intervene sooner.

Our ambition is to help shift healthcare from reacting to disease to anticipating it.

Our story

Foresight was founded by the charity Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration (AAAMD) and its partners Sight Scotland, Sight Scotland Veterans, Macular Society, and Blind Veterans UK. Foresight has also received support from the BrightFocus Foundation (USA) and Topcon Healthcare.

Foresight aims to disrupt healthcare practices by shifting from reactive disease treatment to proactive health preservation.

As the UK’s largest initiative for collecting retinal image data outside hospitals, Foresight supports the discovery of new biomarkers and their links to various health disorders.

Our goal is to create a comprehensive dataset of eye scans from 500,000 participants across the UK within the next three years.

Governance

All researcher applications to access data through Foresight are subject to an initial screening to ensure the research adheres to the Five Safes framework. The Five Safes framework is a set of principles that enable data services such as Foresight to provide safe research access to data, and are used by the National Health Service, Health Data Research and other organisations. Applications are also scrutinised by the Foresight Data Access and Ethics Advisory Board, which is made up of a diverse set of external, independent voices.

Our Research Protocol received a Favourable Opinion by the NHS Health Research Authority's Research Ethics Committee, and Foresight is fully registered with the NHS Health Research Authority (HRA) and the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

Foresight is a subsidiary of the charity Action Against Age-related Macular Degeneration (AAAMD). This means that any profits generated by Foresight will be returned to AAAMD and used to pursue its mission to find safe, convenient and affordable solutions to stop the disease. Foresight’s Board of Directors is supported by a Scientific Advisory Board, with experts in ophthalmology and related fields.

Funders and Sponsors

We are grateful to the organisations and partners whose funding, sponsorship, and support help advance Foresight Research’s mission to improve health through innovative data-driven research

Governance

Funders and Sponsors

We are grateful to the organisations and partners whose funding, sponsorship, and support help advance Foresight Research’s mission to improve health through innovative data-driven research