Tim Spector

Research

  • Research

TwinsUK, King’s College London

Tim Spector is the Founder and Director of TwinsUK, the UK’s largest adult twin registry with 15,000 identical and non-identical twins from across the UK. It is also the most clinically detailed in the world. This cohort was set up in 1992 initially to investigate the incidence of osteoporosis and other rheumatologic diseases and over the years it has expanded to include multiple diseases and conditions. It provides a rich platform for scientists from all over the world to research health and ageing and has facilitated thousands of science collaborations resulting in over 1000 publications twinsuk.ac.uk

Nutrition Studies

Tim Spector is the co-founder of Zoe, a nutritional science company who investigates how our biological responses to food are based on individual characteristics like the bacteria in your gut.

Tim leads on the largest Nutrition Science research in the world, the ZOE Predict studies. Together with colleagues from Harvard, Lund, Massachusetts General Hospital, Oxford, Stanford Tufts and KCL, he has been able to analyse individual metabolic responses to standardised meals in order to predict personalised food responses based on individual biology and unique microbiome profile.

The team then used the data to develop an personalised app that allows individuals to monitor their own body responses to the food they consume and identify the most beneficial diet for them to improve and maintain optimal levels of health joinzoe.com

Covid-19 and the Zoe Health Studies

Tim is the lead researcher behind the well-known citizen science health project – the Covid Symptom study app for which he was awarded an OBE. This free tool has been used by more than 4 million people in the UK, US, and Sweden. The app created by Zoe identified new symptoms of the disease and risk factors as well as monitoring its progress to warn health authorities. This study is now expanding to research other major diseases such as cancer, dementia, and heart disease using a group of 800,000 highly active participants.