healthmedicinet

Medicine, Health Care UCI Participates in NIH’s Landmark…

Published: May 2, 2018.
Released by University of California – Irvine  

The All of Us Research Program opens for national enrollment Sunday, May 6. Led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), All of Us is an unprecedented effort to gather genetic, biological, environmental, health and lifestyle data from 1 million or more volunteer participants living in the United States. A major component of the federal Precision Medicine Initiative, the program’s ultimate goal is to accelerate research and improve health.

“The diversity expected among California’s participants in the All of Us Research Program will be an important part of the scientific journey to discover how people’s personal characteristics, including genetics, behaviors and their physical environment, affect individual health,” said Hoda Anton-Culver, PhD, co-leader of the California Precision Medicine Consortium, principal investigator of the All of Us Research Program at UCI School of Medicine and director of the UCI Genetic Epidemiology Research Institute. “We look forward to advancing the future of health with our many participants.”

Unlike research studies that are focused on a specific disease or population, All of Us will serve as a national research resource to inform thousands of studies, covering a wide variety of health conditions. Researchers will be able to access data from the program to learn more about how individual differences in lifestyle, environment and biological makeup can influence health and disease. Participants will be able to access their own health information, summary data about the entire participant community and information about studies and findings that come from All of Us.

In California, the All of Us Research Program is being implemented by the California Precision Medicine Consortium, which is co-led by Anton-Culver and Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, at UC San Diego Health and also includes UC Davis, UC San Francisco, Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the San Diego Blood Bank. In San Diego, San Ysidro Health is also enrolling participants, and the Scripps Translational Science Institute at The Scripps Research Institute is working with corporate partners to enroll participants nationwide.

Congress has authorized $1.5 billion over 10 years for All of Us. More than 25,000 people nationwide have already joined the program as part of a yearlong beta testing phase that helped shape the participant experience.

“The time is now to transform how we conduct research — with participants as partners — to shed new light on how to stay healthy and manage disease in more personalized ways. This is what we can accomplish through All of Us,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD.