Precision Medicine Initiative
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The All of Us Research Program (previously known as the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program) is a
precision medicine Precision, precise or precisely may refer to: Arts and media * ''Precision'' (march), the official marching music of the Royal Military College of Canada * "Precision" (song), by Big Sean * ''Precisely'' (sketch), a dramatic sketch by the Eng ...
research program created in 2015 under the
Obama Administration Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, took office following his victory over Republican nomine ...
with $130 million in funding that aims to make advances in tailoring medical care to the individual's genetics. The mission of All of Us is to accelerate health and medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment and care. The project aimed to collect genetic and health data from one million volunteers, and recruited around 297,549 participants. The project says its data is analyzed by 2,300 researchers.


Program

The initiative was announced during the 2015 State of the Union Address, and is run by the
National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...
(NIH). The program is bilingual, with information and materials available in Spanish and English.


Enrollment

Eligible adults (18 and over) can enroll with the program. People who are not eligible are those in prison or people who cannot consent on their own According to a sample consent form released in June 2018, participation in All of Us is voluntary and does not affect a participant's medical care. The form explains that if a participant quits the program, their samples will be destroyed. Children may also be able to enroll in the program. By January 2018 an initial pilot project had enrolled about 10,000 people and 2022 was targeted for one million people. As of May 2019, enrollment numbers at the one-year launch anniversary are 187,000+ participants. More than 132,000 have already given biosamples. The NIH reported in May 2018 that they were pleased with the high enrollment by underrepresented groups including communities of color and individuals with lower incomes. Up to three-quarters of beta phase participants came from those communities.


Program partners

''All of Us'' has more than 100 partners working to implement and support the mission and goals of the research. Google life sciences startup Verily Life Sciences, a Google "moonshot" with a goal of "transform ngthe way we detect, prevent, and manage disease" is one partner. The initiative was identified by a 2019 review as involving the public in every stage of the research.


Program budget

The ''All of Us'' Research Program budget has increased every year since it launched: FY2016 - $130 million; FY2017 - $230 million; and FY2018 - $290 million.


Responses to the Initiative

Professor Kenneth Weiss from
Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...
, in a skeptical review of this project in 2017, suggested that the funding could be better spent elsewhere.


Program progress


Enrollment

The research program was launched for national enrollment on May 6, 2018. In the summer of 2019, one year after its official launch, All of Us had enrolled 230,000 participants, which represents almost one quarter of the program's goal of 1,000,000 individuals. Approximately 80% of those people are from groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in biomedical research. One of All of US's main goals is to include many people from diverse ancestries. By June 2020, enrollment reached approximately 350,000 individuals.


All of Us Researcher Workbench

On May 27, 2020, the All of Us research program announced the launch of their research platform, the All of Us Researcher Workbench, for
beta testing Software testing is the act of checking whether software satisfies expectations. Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the quality of software and the risk of its failure to a user or sponsor. Software test ...
. Select data collected by the initiative, including electronic health records and survey responses from the first 225,000 program participants, will be available to approved researchers through the workbench. Researchers may apply for access to the data if they have an NIH eRA Commons account (for identity verification) and are affiliated with an institution that has signed a data use agreement with All of Us.


Response to COVID-19 pandemic

In June 2020, the NIH announced that research materials collected as part of the All of Us initiative will be used to address the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
. Blood samples collected from recent volunteers will be tested for
SARS-CoV-2 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus previously had the Novel coronavirus, provisional nam ...
antibodies An antibody (Ab) or immunoglobulin (Ig) is a large, Y-shaped protein belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily which is used by the immune system to identify and neutralize antigens such as bacteria and viruses, including those that caus ...
in order to track prior infections within the US population. Electronic health records shared by All of Us participants will also be evaluated for potential patterns associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection. All of Us also added monthly participant surveys with questions about the physical, mental, and socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.


Administration

The founding program director was Eric Dishman, who stepped down to become the Chief Innovation Officer. In 2019, Joshua Denny was selected to be the second director. In October 2016, the project was renamed "All of Us".


Publications

The project published in ''
Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
'' in 2024, linking
electronic health records An electronic health record (EHR) is the systematized collection of electronically stored patient and population health information in a digital format. These records can be shared across different health care settings. Records are shared thro ...
to genomics data in some participants. The paper uses a uniform manifold approximation and projection algorithm. Genetics of the participants were published in a 2025
Nature Communications ''Nature Communications'' is a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio since 2010. It is a multidisciplinary journal that covers the natural sciences, including physics, chemistry, earth sciences, medic ...
article. The 2025 paper shows various
principal components analysis Principal component analysis (PCA) is a Linear map, linear dimensionality reduction technique with applications in exploratory data analysis, visualization and Data Preprocessing, data preprocessing. The data is linear map, linearly transformed ...
projections of the biobank's genetic diversity.


See also

*
100,000 Genomes Project The 100,000 Genomes Project is a now-completed UK Government project managed by Genomics England that is sequencing whole genomes from National Health Service patients. The project is focusing on rare diseases, some common types of cancer, and i ...
(UK) *
21st Century Cures Act The 21st Century Cures Act is a United States law enacted by the 114th United States Congress in December 2016 and then signed into law on December 13, 2016. It authorized $6.3 billion in funding, mostly for the National Institutes of Health. The ...
*
Baseline Study Project Baseline is a broad effort to map human health led by Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences), Alphabet, Inc.'s health sciences division, and was announced in the Wall Street Journal on July 24, 2014. It begins with the Proje ...
*
Precision medicine Precision, precise or precisely may refer to: Arts and media * ''Precision'' (march), the official marching music of the Royal Military College of Canada * "Precision" (song), by Big Sean * ''Precisely'' (sketch), a dramatic sketch by the Eng ...
* precisionFDA


References


Notes

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External links


Join All of Us
homepage to join the ''All of Us'' research program
All of Us
homepage at the
National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in 1887 and is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Service ...

NIH Innovation
account on
USAspending.gov USAspending.gov is a database of spending by the United States federal government. History Around the time of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006's passage, OMB Watch, a government watchdog group, was developing a ...
American medical research Supercomputing Medical databases Biobank organizations Epidemiology