The Oxford group is leading the MolPAGE (Molecular Phenotyping to Accelerate Genomic Epidemiology) consortium - a 4-year project, funded by the European Union FP6 programme to the value of 12 million Euros, that brings together a consortium of 19 leading academic institutions, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, with expertise in a wide variety of ‘omics’ technologies and in the biology of metabolic disease. The consortium partners are applying a range of genomic, metabonomic and proteomic tools in the development of novel technical, data analysis and integration protocols that will facilitate biomarker discovery and typing projects on an epidemiological scale. The clinical focus of this project is metabolic disease, with the objective of identifying biomarkers which can predict pre-clinical status and increased risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The main aims of the project are (a) the development of standardized, optimized approaches to biobanking; (b) the development, upscaling and validation of existing and de novo technologies for molecular phenotyping on an epidemiologic scale (in areas of transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenomics, metabonomics and peptidomics); (c) advances in data management and statistical analysis of large data sets which permit an integrated view of the transcriptional, proteomic and metabonomic changes which associate with and/or predict disease, and (d) implementation of these advances to support biomarker discovery efforts in diabetes and other conditions.