NEW ORLEANS – It is not too late to enroll your patients or yourself into the largest longitudinal cohort study ever initiated, according to Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, who is director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Since May 2018, when it was initiated, the NIH-funded All of Us Research Program has already enrolled 200,000 of the planned goal of one million participants in the United States. Of these, approximately half have already provided baseline demographics and health information as well as their consent to use the slew of health data that is being collected.
“The only way to do this kind of thing is to have data – a lot of it,” said Dr. Collins, explaining the premise of the All of Us Research Program in an interview conducted at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society.
The data are not limited to medical records: Blood samples, whole genome sequencing, wearable activity monitors, and subject-completed questionnaires are among a long list of sources of information to be collected from participants, who are expected to be followed indefinitely.
According to Dr. Collins, who delivered a plenary address at the meeting, these data will become more valuable over time, one of the most important goals of this study is to prepare the way for precision medicine. As opposed to the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to treating disease, he believes that this large dataset will allow researchers to understand differences in common diseases at the individual level.
In relation to endocrinology, Dr. Collins said that a cohort of one million participants would be expected to have close to 100,000 individuals with diabetes mellitus.
“This is going to be transformative,” said Dr. Collins, who emphasized that the enrollment is specifically designed to capture participants from diverse ethnic and racial groups.
All of the data collected will be made broadly available to research initiatives of all kinds, many of which have not yet even been envisioned.
Information on enrollment is available on line: joinallofus.org.