Newswise — In 2018, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched an ambitious effort to advance individualized health care by enrolling one million or more participants who reflect the diversity of the country. The All of Us Research Program aims to build one of the largest health databases of its kind, allowing researchers to learn how biology, lifestyle, and environment impact health. Participants can contribute data through electronic health records, survey responses, activity monitors, and DNA through blood or saliva samples. Researchers are already using this data to learn more about why people get sick or stay healthy, and to find better ways to prevent and treat illnesses.
The University of Chicago joined the initial phase of All of Us as part of the Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium (IPMC), along with Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital and Health Sciences System, Rush University Medical Center, and the NorthShore University Health System. Now, the NIH has just awarded a new $12 million award to the IPMC to continue its work, with renewal potential every year for four additional years. Governors State University will also join the consortium with the new award.
Researchers from UChicago will focus on refining and enhancing participant enrollment and engagement processes, maintaining long-term retention of participants, and linking new sources of medical and genetic data to lay the foundation for future research.
“This sets the table for exciting research,” said Habibul Ahsan, MBBS, the Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor of Public Health Sciences at UChicago. “Participants are the backbone of this program. Participation opens opportunities for many exciting explorations in genomic and computational research.”
Ahsan, who is the Dean for Population and Precision Health and Director of the Institute for Population and Precision Health (IPPH) at UChicago, will serve as the Principal Investigator of the IPMC for the new phase of the project. Brisa Aschebrook-Kilfoy, PhD, Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences, will be a Co-Principal Investigator for the project.
The IPMC is one of several All of Us consortiums across the country. As the program continues to expand through the support of national partners, participants provide a broad range of information, including new surveys on mental health and well-being.
Ancillary All of Us studies are also underway at UChicago. For example, the NIH CommonFund Nutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program, launched enrollment in early 2023. The study, led by Aschebrook-Kilfoy at UChicago, is developing algorithms that predict how individuals respond to different foods and dietary patterns. The study will build upon the comprehensive data already collected by All of Us to help advance precision nutrition.
“Individuals and health care providers will soon benefit from applications of improved data and analytic opportunities, like artificial intelligence, to make nutrition decisions based on algorithms,” Aschebrook-Kilfoy said. “This is insight we are all interested in having as scientists but also as individuals who also want to live healthier lives.”
The Illinois group will continue recruiting participants. More than 44,000 people from Illinois have been enrolled since 2018, and the group plans to enroll 8,500 in the next year.
Ahsan said the UChicago-led team will place a particular focus on enrolling participants from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds who are typically underrepresented in medical research. Nearly 80% of participants enrolled in Illinois during the first phase identified with communities underrepresented in medical research—more than 35% of those were African American. The UChicago team plans to continue this strong representation by working with UChicago Medicine Health System locations throughout the south suburbs and northwest Indiana and engaging with academic partners like Governors State University.
Such outreach is crucial, Ahsan said, to give all communities a seat at the table for advancing precision health research. “Many people in our community have been left out of cutting-edge genomics research because the level of commitment required to engage them, enroll them, and follow up hasn’t been done on a large scale,” he said. “By making sure that more people are represented, decisions about precision health and disease prevention can be made on an individual level in the future.”
All of Us is a registered service mark of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).
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