Precision Medicine Research

The Precision Medicine Initiative was launched in January 2015 and provided funding to the  National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to support research, development, and innovation related to tailoring care to patients based on their genetic profiles.

Precision medicine has been used in practice for quite some time. For example, we know that for certain cancers, lab tests can sometimes help doctors select chemotherapy agents that are more likely to work. We also know that genetic mutations can make some patients poor candidates for certain drugs, and alternative medications should be prescribed instead. The goal of the Precision Medicine Initiative is to accelerate our understanding of how to tailor our therapies for patients based on their genetic information.

A Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group assembled in March 2015 and concluded its work in September 2015 with a report which included recommendations to launch a project to transform the understanding of factors contributing to individual health and disease. That set the stage for the “All of Us” Research Program which launched in May 2018 and seeks to enroll one million people across the U.S. to help build one of the most diverse health databases in history.

This creates more opportunities to:

• Know the risk factors for certain diseases
• Figure out which treatments work best for people of different backgrounds
• Connect people with the right clinical studies for their needs
• Learn how technologies can help us take steps to be healthier

Here’s an overview of how the program works:

You can read more about the program in this article. If you are interested in participating, you can enroll through https://joinallofus.org/ or download a smartphone app for iOS or Android. From there, you’ll be asked to fill out a series of questionnaires about your health, and eventually you may be given the opportunity to complete additional health surveys, use smartphone and sensor devices for data collection, and/or join future studies that could involve in-person visits or biospecimen collections.

A public Data Browser provides interactive views of the publicly available All of Us Research Program participant data. All data are de-identified, meaning that while each individual’s data are pooled into the master database, there should be no personally identifying information that could allow visitors or researchers to trace the data bace to the individual source.