ONE of Britain’s most highly regarded heart surgeons, Professor Jaspal Kooner is on a historic mission that could save millions of lives.  

With support from the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute of Health Research, Kooner established the South Asian Biobank project which has set out to answer the age-long question: “Why are the people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka plus Asians in the UK and across the diaspora so susceptible to cardiovascular disease and diabetes?” 

If he can find answers, the effect will be phenomenal. 

“Just imagine the impact you will create every year in a quarter of the world’s population,” Kooner said previously to GG2 Power List.  

“(Compared with the white population) Asians are at two-fold higher risk of cardiovascular disease, three-fold higher risk of diabetes and five-fold higher risk of kidney failure,” he said.   

South Asia Biobank Study is a large-scale prospective study which will collect detailed health and life-style information, and biological samples in 200,000 South Asians aged between 25- and 85-years old living in the UK and South Asia.  

For his project, five research centres have been set up – two in India (Delhi and Chennai), and one each in Pakistan (Lahore), Bangladesh (Dhaka) and Sri Lanka (Colombo). Patients’ details, which will be stored on computer and monitored regularly, will include “blood pressure, height and weight, body mass index, electro-cardiograms, spirometry to assess the lungs and retinal photography”. 

So far as the pandemic is concerned, he asked a fundamental question: “Some Asians did not get Covid;